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Cancelled HS2

Sue Pertwee-Tyr said:
It's the uniforms. Can't run a railway without uniforms.
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TheDecameron said:
Discipline, it’s all about discipline and a strong will.
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I think it's all too easy to dismiss the power of good tailoring. This country now spends all its time loafing around in lounge gear and sports casual wear and its all going to the dogs. QED.
 
Seeker_UK said:
I think it's all too easy to dismiss the power of good tailoring. This country now spends all its time loafing around in lounge gear and sports casual wear and its all going to the dogs. QED.
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Yes, it inspires confidence when the ticket inspector is attired properly, like in Italy. You don’t get that here. In Glasgow once when I was on the way home by train, there was terrible electrical interference coming over the speakers. The door was flung open and the conductress, a middle aged woman of about 5ft by 5ft, her face the colour of a boiled lobster, hair pulled tightly up onto the top of her head and brandishing her ticket machine like a weapon, marched in.

She said in rough dialect “ hus rat been goin oan fur long?”. A man said yes, to which she replied without either turning to him or breaking her stride, “ that would burst yer nut” and marched out of the carriage, the door slamming behind her.
 
tones said:
Actually, it's all about seeing railways as valuable infrastructure that will last for many decades, and being prepared to invest in them.
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That is it in every case. The UK is one gigantic dumpster fire due to a political system which hands absolute power to parties which lack the vision to see anything beyond their existing five year term. Just decade after decade of vacuous short-termism has left the country hollowed-out and quite literally powerless (i.e. without power; we should have been building nuclear back in the ‘80s and ‘90s, but we chose tax cuts and dealing with gangsters and religious extremists for oil).
 
ALthough I rank UK rail as worse than just about everywhere in Europe, I can't trust the French system so I avoid it. I've been caught out by strikes a couple of times in 4 years. I suspect they are on strike about 5 times more than anywhere else.
 
I don't think our rail service is as bad as made out, there is a tendency to go all misty eyed when looking at other countries in Europe. Very few of us have lived overseas for protracted lengths of time & undergone everyday travel in rush hour; the holiday experience is rather misleading. I do think London has fantastic public transport, just wish I could say the same about other parts of the country. I can generally get an off-peak return to London for around £90 which is pretty reasonable & far cheaper if I go on set trains.
 
Commuter woes into London are legendary. Fancy standing all the way from Milton Keynes? £5.5k for a season ticket. They’re also the filthiest seats I’ve ever seen- you’d need to get your suit dry cleaned after sitting on them, if you can find an empty one.
 
TheDecameron said:
Commuter woes into London are legendary. Fancy standing all the way from Milton Keynes? £5.5k for a season ticket. They’re also the filthiest seats I’ve ever seen- you’d need to get your suit dry cleaned after sitting on them, if you can find an empty one.
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East Midlands Railways has just removed all intercity services to / from London from my local station (Wellingborough) replacing them with 'suburban' type trains which are 20-year old cast-offs from Greater Anglia with cattle-class seats, one toilet per train (which, if you're lucky is working and has toilet paper), no buffet service and an occasional guard mooching up and down the train. Season ticket price before this, £7900 pa. Price after? £7900. B*stards.
 
TheDecameron said:
Commuter woes into London are legendary. Fancy standing all the way from Milton Keynes? £5.5k for a season ticket. They’re also the filthiest seats I’ve ever seen- you’d need to get your suit dry cleaned after sitting on them, if you can find an empty one.
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Not my experience from Bletchley, unless of course you're using the Southern service. I can work from home most of the time now and go in off-peak if I have to go to the office. I do at most one day a week at regular commuter times.

Make do and mend seems to be the order of the day on UK railways. We had a chance to make a new HS line and it's been watered down and doesn't do what it needs to do the most - connect the North. I admire the Swiss attitude and network, but it's all designed to inter-connect and the dwell times are enormous as a result. Having said that I know that connections will be made and the bus will be there if you need it.

My village is subject to road closures and huge disruption because they're rebuilding the Oxford - Cambridge line branded as East-West Rail. The section to Oxford was mothballed several years ago but it may as well have been rebuilt fully by the time they're finished. And yet, after the Government's commitment to low carbon, the line isn't even being electrified. I complained to my MP and he replied: "Considering the visual blight caused by the instalment of overhead catenaries through a largely rural area, such as North Buckinghamshire, I believe that in this instance, conventional electrification of East West Rail is not the most suitable option.". Apparently battery electric and Hydrogen fuelled trains will be an option when it opens. That's rubbish - they'll be DMU cast-offs from somewhere else.
 
MJS said:
Not my experience from Bletchley, unless of course you're using the Southern service. I can work from home most of the time now and go in off-peak if I have to go to the office. I do at most one day a week at regular commuter times.

Make do and mend seems to be the order of the day on UK railways. We had a chance to make a new HS line and it's been watered down and doesn't do what it needs to do the most - connect the North. I admire the Swiss attitude and network, but it's all designed to inter-connect and the dwell times are enormous as a result. Having said that I know that connections will be made and the bus will be there if you need it.

My village is subject to road closures and huge disruption because they're rebuilding the Oxford - Cambridge line branded as East-West Rail. The section to Oxford was mothballed several years ago but it may as well have been rebuilt fully by the time they're finished. And yet, after the Government's commitment to low carbon, the line isn't even being electrified. I complained to my MP and he replied: "Considering the visual blight caused by the instalment of overhead catenaries through a largely rural area, such as North Buckinghamshire, I believe that in this instance, conventional electrification of East West Rail is not the most suitable option.". Apparently battery electric and Hydrogen fuelled trains will be an option when it opens. That's rubbish - they'll be DMU cast-offs from somewhere else.
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Re: DMU cast-offs from somewhere else, these:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Rail_Class_769

Keep an old SR\BR Tradition alive; use old parts of an existing train and add new shit to it.

Those who used Southern Region\ Network South East suburban services up until the mid 'nineties may remember the EPB family.

Some of these used underframes and other mechanical components from the 1920's and 1930's.

Let that sink in for a bit.

Oh, and those who use the Southern Trains Class 455 will be propelled by ancient English Electric motors and other equipment removed from something called a 4 SUB...

:D
 
I think todays confirmation that the Eastern leg of HS2 is cancelled is desperately sad. Another generation or two at least will miss out on it's potential in order to fund other railway political quick fixes. We have all the momentum, the project team, the skilled labour to plough on and build it, but now not the political will. They fudged it. Grant Shapps looked like a hopeless lost soul trying to justify the U-turn. I do think Shapps really believed in the full HS2 project, and if so, he should have told Boris and Rishi to stick it for not backing him.

In the last few weeks, we have seen Rishi cut air duty and now cut HS2 whilst the Government held COP26 and told us they were committed to cutting co2. It doesn't look that way to me.

HS2 should have been so much more than it will now deliver. It really should have been built backwards - from the North down-over so that they can't go back on their promises like this.
 
Stuart Frazer said:
I think todays confirmation that the Eastern leg of HS2 is cancelled is desperately sad. Another generation or two at least will miss out on it's potential in order to fund other railway political quick fixes. We have all the momentum, the project team, the skilled labour to plough on and build it, but now not the political will. They fudged it. Grant Shapps looked like a hopeless lost soul trying to justify the U-turn. I do think Shapps really believed in the full HS2 project, and if so, he should have told Boris and Rishi to stick it for not backing him.

In the last few weeks, we have seen Rishi cut air duty and now cut HS2 whilst the Government held COP26 and told us they were committed to cutting co2. It doesn't look that way to me.

HS2 should have been so much more than it will now deliver. It really should have been built backwards - from the North down-over so that they can't go back on their promises like this.
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The Eastern leg hasn't been cancelled, it just ends at East Midlands Parkway, and as Samuel Johnson almost said "When a man is bored with East Midlands Parkway, he is bored with life". It's a destination on the bucket list of many Hoxton hipsters, and when HS2 is up and running, they will be able to get there in no time.
 
Terminating at East Midlands Parkway is hardly the full Eastern Leg as promised. It's not the real North and HS2 won't now reach Sheffield, Leeds nor interface with the East Coast Mainline North of York. Infact East Coast Mainline now misses out all together. I therefore doubt that Newcastle, Durham and Darlington will see HS2. They promised so much and as usual, will deliver far too little.
 
I see Labour are describing the u-turn as “the great train robbery”, which is rather good IMO.

PS A clip of Johnson has just been on Sky claiming he’ll “level-up the north to the commuter-grade network they enjoy in the south”. Translated from Tory lie-speak that means ‘crowded, late, stinking and absurdly overpriced’…
 
A nice phrase on LBC this morning. ‘Johnson will piss on your shoes and tell you it’s raining’. I can’t believe the excuses that are rolling out. And when he said they had made a huge success of Crossrail, I nearly spat out my Shredded Wheat. The electorate is being gaslit, and now the Mail has a new Dacre clone in charge, it will only get worse.
Welcome to the one party state.
 
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