www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/ja...-rail-crowded-island

I used to be very strongly pro high speed rail, but I'm starting to think that it would be better to connect lots of smaller towns to the network and making that a lot cheaper. Sure, it would be better if there weren't rich people flying from Scotland to London to save a bit of time, but how many cars could be got off the road by spending the money that high speed rail would cost? It would be nice if I could go to Scotland for a weekend easily but how often am I going to do that, really?

I think he's wrong about Crossrail though. Business has agreed to pay a levy for it, and I have no reason to think they're mistaken about making money. And the Central Line is more than a "bit crowded".

I don't think as a (relatively small geographically) country we need higher-speed links between London and the urban Midlands or Manchester and Leeds. They're already well-enough served, more or less, and close. The Scottish cities and the North-East are more remote, but managing with existing rail and motorway networks.

As I mentioned on the last such thread, it's great to get on a train in Paris and flit non-stop to Lyon at 300 kph- but that's not much use to locals to live in unserved towns between the two.

I think there's more of a case for regional high speed rail than the national one really- eg between fairly close places like Edinburgh-Glasgow and Leeds-Manchester. This would cost nowhere near the London-Scotland line and make those areas much more a single entity, which has to be good.

Put another way there are 50 flights to and from Edinburgh each day, similar number from Glasgow.

The people on these two hundred daily flights have to leave their home towns to get to the airports, but also have to get to their destinations from the airports.

20,000 convoluted journeys each day - taking spaces in the motorway or seats in the underground. Perhaps there is a lot of sense in this idea.

Sure, it would be better if there weren't rich people flying from Scotland to London to save a bit of time

Last time I had to go to Scotland the plane was cheaper than the train.

Flying Iberia Barcelona-Madrid next weekend: €99

Cheapest AVE ticket Barcelona-Madrid next weekend: €182

It's a bit of an assumption that aeroplanes are necessarily a more complicated journey as well - for me, Heathrow is a bus away, King's Cross is a train and two tubes.

Saxon, yeah, I know it's cheaper by plane. I was talking about where, as I suggested, the train fares were massively subsidised (using some of the money talked about for high speed rail) and also air travel was much more taxed. Then it would just be people for whom money was not much of an object. it would be better if they didn't use the plane, but it seems a lot of money to get them on to rail. Just talking about these people, couldn't you get them out of cars on the leg to the airport for far less?

I don't know how far these measures would eat into the 50 flights per day from Edinburgh and Glasgow to London. Manchester to London though would be massively reduced if it was cheaper by train.

Taxing kerosene would be a first step to level the playing-field though, wouldn't it.

Agree about the need to prioritise improving short-distance journeys. It takes an hour to get from Manchester to Liverpool, which is ridiculous and bound to be economically damaging, particularly to the latter. Ditto Leeds-Sheffield. Leeds-Manchester's actually a reasonably swift train journey though, and a lovely one, scenically.

Yes, except for the bits in tunnels of course.

I remember going by train from Leeds to Manchester when I was about 13, to spend a few days with my big bro who had recently started work there. The train stopped at Huddersfield and Stalybridge if I remember rightly. I remember feeling some vague sense that at some point, as one crossed the old county border from Yorks to Lancs, things should start looking different - sinister people perhaps, maybe wearing the villainous cloaks of the evil empire. I dare say the actual border crossing is around the highest point of the route, in a tunnel, which would make it difficult to put up some kind of "abandon hope, all ye good folk of Yorkshire who cross this point" notice.

Border formalities in Ireland are fairly relaxed (ie, usually non-existent) but travelling by road or rail you can always tell the crossing point- it's where the tricolors start to appear.

yes, there are a lot of them around newry.

E10, some good news on the Liverpool-Manchester front, and indeed in other places nearby. Hardly the bullet train but well worth doing. Electrification:

www.railwaygazette.com/news/single-view/...electrification.html

E10 Rifle wrote:
Agree about the need to prioritise improving short-distance journeys. It takes an hour to get from Manchester to Liverpool, which is ridiculous and bound to be economically damaging, particularly to the latter. Ditto Leeds-Sheffield. Leeds-Manchester's actually a reasonably swift train journey though, and a lovely one, scenically.

Sheffield — Manchester's very pictureskew too and also rather slow but, y'know, so what? We need a world with more time to reflect and less speed.

Ha! London Underground's put up a poster quoting Gandhi saying something along those lines. It's OK for you, with your deep appreciation of landscape, but people running trains should be fired for saying it.

High speed rail is fine as long as it is integrated properly. The HS2 plan for the UK is long overdue but it needs to be interoperable with conventional railways. Both the TGV in France and ICE in Germany use portions of the network which are not high speed. In this manner the current Edinburgh to Bristol cross-country route could be vastly improved by taking the high speed part from Edinburgh to Birmingham. Likewise with a High Speed 2 you should be looking at London to Inverness journey times of a little over five hours, perhaps less with speed increases and some higher spec trains on the highland main line. Most pressing is a new or improved line across Fife from Edinburgh to Perth.
I would like to direct you to Botniabanan in Sweden which is, to my knowledge, the only single track high speed railway in existence but could serve as a template for future projects in both Northern Scotland and West Wales. The new track is single with dynamic passing places and should give a Stokcholm to Umeå journey time of around five hours. It has been expensive to build but is nothing on the cost of a new double track route.

I've never though of single track.

The rail system as designed by Amor de Cosmos:

Tubby Isaacs wrote:
Ha! London Underground's put up a poster quoting Gandhi saying something along those lines. It's OK for you, with your deep appreciation of landscape, but people running trains should be fired for saying it.

And even moreso when said trains are running underground. Not a lot of scenery to reflect on last time I was on the Tube...