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What northward continuation would you have? Scotland and Newcastle are served fine by the existing lines. The only place in the right direction is Leeds, based on eyeballing the map. I suppose with some upgrades you could move Leeds traffic to the MML or future MML-like line, but I'm not sure why you would want to.
What about…the great metropolis of Northallerton, via Leeds and York? Trains could continue either to Middlesbrough, Sunderland or Hartlepool, or on the ECML. It would unlock capacity on the ECML and the Cross Country Route.
York is not a very big city, granted, but it’s a major tourist destination and the railhead for a very large area.
HS2 had it right by going for as simple and as self contained as possible, and by going for a non-divisible phase 1 that's as small as possible and no smaller. If HS2 were to be a series of online upgrades and had more interfaces with the conventional network for clever through running, it would have ended up in a same sticky place as RRX.
HS2 wasn't really self contained though. It was designed to be somewhat integrated into the broader railway system with all the problems that entails.
If you want to go self contained you don't base the economics on the scheme on half your trains running on the conventional system, even after your project is complete.
HS2 has managed to end up with the worst of both worlds - its neither self contained enough to truly gain the benefits of that mode of operation, nor is it integrated enough with the railway system as a whole to gain the benefits of that mode either. We've got a segregated line from London to Birmingham that we can't fill with "internal" traffic because the railway doesn't connect to enough traffic centres to generate that much, and which we can't fill with "external" traffic because the line dumps its northbound trains straight into a notorious bottleneck.
HS2 wasn't really self contained though. It was designed to be tightly integrated into the broader railway system with all the problems that entails.
If you want to go self contained you don't base the economics on the scheme on half your trains running on the conventional system, even after your project is complete.
Comparing HS2 with RRX is apples and oranges anyway. German HSL are generally not conceived as upgrades to existing lines either. I am quite sure the Germans have done their homework and come to the conclusion that an entirely new line through the Ruhr (for RRX, or for other services so as to make space for RRX) would not have been the better option. So has the UK and rightly has followed the path of most other countries that build new high-speed lines.
My post that you were referencing here, was giving consideration to a new rail link after HS2 in its present form has been completed.
Since HS2 has failed the Sheffield and Leeds areas, and given the potential demand that I demonstrated, then yes I do think a new route from London to Scotland via Sheffield and Leeds could be worth further thought.
Also, when you say Scotland and Newcastle are served well enough by existing lines, I'm thinking of something like Paris to Marseille. This route is slightly longer than London to Edinburgh and has been achieved in just 3 hours for many years.
So I'm afraid I can't agree with your sentiment, I think we should be aspiring for a London-Edinburgh service taking 3 hours flat.
After all, if that could be achieved in 10 years from now (which of course is well beyond the UK's capability), we would then *only* be several decades behind the French!
So yes, I do think there is plenty of scope for a future route from London to Sheffield and Scotland to fill in one of the gaps in the UK network
Edinburgh is west of Manchester. It doesn't make sense to serve London to Scotland through the Sheffield/Leeds area or further east except to pick up north east traffic. Also, the Yorkshire Dales and North Pennines are in the way if you go straight for Scotland.
I think you can make an argument that the ECML is not particularly well routed to serve the broader north east.
It avoids many of the larger settlements in favour of older but smaller ones. Darlington instead of Middlesbrough, Durham instead of Sunderland etc.
I think if you were building a railway line to serve the North East now, you wouldn't select the ECML's route.
What about…the great metropolis of Northallerton, via Leeds and York? Trains could continue either to Middlesbrough, Sunderland or Hartlepool, or on the ECML. It would unlock capacity on the ECML and the Cross Country Route.
York is not a very big city, granted, but it’s a major tourist destination and the railhead for a very large area.
Reasonable, but a new London to Sheffield route seems like a circuitous way to serve those areas. HS2 2b east makes some sense since you would reuse the segment to Birmingham, but this wouldn't, and it seems like it would be better to follow the ECML more if you're building new things at London.
Edinburgh is west of Manchester. It doesn't make sense to serve London to Scotland through the Sheffield/Leeds area or further east except to pick up north east traffic. Also, the Yorkshire Dales and North Pennines are in the way if you go straight for Scotland.
Why mention Manchester? Yes if you're heading directly from Manchester to Edinburgh there are arguably hills if you go in a straight line, but the present Manchester to Scotland services manage perfectly well going via Preston.
Then there is the fact that London to Edinburgh is shorter via ECML than via WCML, and a new route could logically go via Leeds without really adding to the present ECML distance.
And you're overlooking that I was only talking about a new London to Scotland route after the present HS2 is completed, which wouldn't run via Manchester. Of course there should be a high quality link from Manchester to Leeds to join into a route to Scotland, but that's additional.
Reasonable, but a new London to Sheffield route seems like a circuitous way to serve those areas. HS2 2b east makes some sense since you would reuse the segment to Birmingham, but this wouldn't, and it seems like it would be better to follow the ECML more if you're building new things at London.
You say that heading via Sheffield is a circuitous way to serve the Northeast? And yet the route to get to Leeds with the original HS2 plan was via OOC and the Chilterns? I'd suggest that this is somewhat pot and kettle!
HS2 fought a long and probably unwinnable court battle with the EU over their choice of platform height until eventually being bailed out by Brexit.
And now we will be stuck with a handful of very intensively used, very akward platforms of the wrong height forever. Or at least without an enormously disruptive rebuild.
Could the platform height not be changed along with the rolling stock order: is buying unsuitable rolling stock that is too high for level boarding on the rest of the network not a sunk cost fallacy? If the lower trains 'only' manage 250kph, so what... its still more than twice the motorway speed and the UK is a small country.
HS2 wasn't really self contained though. It was designed to be somewhat integrated into the broader railway system with all the problems that entails.
If you want to go self contained you don't base the economics on the scheme on half your trains running on the conventional system, even after your project is complete.
HS2 has managed to end up with the worst of both worlds - its neither self contained enough to truly gain the benefits of that mode of operation, nor is it integrated enough with the railway system as a whole to gain the benefits of that mode either. We've got a segregated line from London to Birmingham that we can't fill with "internal" traffic because the railway doesn't connect to enough traffic centres to generate that much, and which we can't fill with "external" traffic because the line dumps its northbound trains straight into a notorious bottleneck.
I don't get these purest positions. HS2 needs neither be fully self contained nor uber integrated.
The problem that needed solving was the existing inter-city railways are trying to be all things to all people. HS2 solves that problem by having Milton Keynes served by one railway and Birmingham served by the other. There's no point in HS2 becoming all things to all people.
It makes no sense to exclude the Liverpool and Scotlands from HS2 either - places that don't generate enough traffic to warrant dedicated new infrastructure but served by lines with available capacity for HS2 trains to run onto. Handsacre, Crewe, Golborne, Stonebroom and Church Fenton are simple enough HSL / classic interfaces the kind of which are ubiquitous on French and Italian systems - easy-to-build greenfield locations with straightfoward timetabling solutions.
Comparing HS2 with RRX is apples and oranges anyway. German HSL are generally not conceived as upgrades to existing lines either. I am quite sure the Germans have done their homework and come to the conclusion that an entirely new line through the Ruhr (for RRX, or for other services so as to make space for RRX) would not have been the better option. So has the UK and rightly has followed the path of most other countries that build new high-speed lines.
I was merely pointing out complex interfaces carried greater deliverability risks. RRX probably couldn't avoid some of them, but HS2 has made the right decision in not having unnecessarily complex interfaces.
I think the Germans have tied themselves into knots in trying to design major stations to accommodate everywhere to everywhere movements. The Rhine-Ruhr railway network is much inferior to the Randstad network. Somewhere like Dortmund ought to be designed to Dutch principles with a small set of fixed routings. What we are seeing in Germany is just paralysis across the board. HS2 dodged a bullet in not 'doing a Dortmund' in places like Birmingham.
I've forever been impressed when a German train runs across the entire throat of a 20-odd platform station in one super-smooth movement without even a clickety clack (due to their like of pointwork with moving noses, I think that's the term). It makes sense for a low frequency system where connections are important - it allows you to run trains into opposite sides of the same island for high quality interchange.
The same thing doesn't work particularly well on the UK's system which is designed for high frequencies and short dwells as the mechanism of making connections usable rather than co-ordination on services that often only run at 0.5 or at best 1tph.
The problem that needed solving was the existing inter-city railways are trying to be all things to all people. HS2 solves that problem by having Milton Keynes served by one railway and Birmingham served by the other. There's no point in HS2 becoming all things to all people.
The problem with this approach is that, in order to achieve it, HS2 has to gather a huge amount of traffic through a sprawling network of branches, or it turns into a white elephant.
It still tries to serve a huge, disparate group of people, they are just geographically dispersed rather than dispersed by traffic type (ie. they are all longer distance passengers but from all over, rather than being different types of passengers from a smaller area).
A geographically compact solution is less reliant on its later phases to not become a debacle.
It's also a step towards eventually escaping the limitations of the existing, unsuitable system in a way that the "gather long distance passengers from everywhere" approach is not.
All HS2 has to achieve to meet its stated objective "capacity relief" is to beat the existing railway on the required journey combinations.
You could add many more stations and serve them without endangering that ultimate objective.
It makes no sense to exclude the Liverpool and Scotlands from HS2 either - places that don't generate enough traffic to warrant dedicated new infrastructure but served by lines with available capacity for HS2 trains to run onto.
You don't necessarily have to go for literally all internal traffic to gain the benefits of segregation. If there was two trains per hour from Liverpool and everything else was internal, the risk of contamination of paths would be small regardles.
The problem is that the supposedly segregated system is stacked full of trains from all over.
Even with areas where there is no justification for all new infrastructure, existing infrastructure could be reworked to provide partial or total segregation.
Handsacre, Crewe, Golborne, Stonebroom and Church Fenton are simple enough HSL / classic interfaces the kind of which are ubiquitous on French and Italian systems - easy-to-build greenfield locations with straightfoward timetabling solutions.
But the problem is you can only run your timetable if you get all of them.
If you don't, because your later phases don't arrive, you are in a much worse situation than if you can fill more of your line with traffic from day one.
As it is, we now have Handsacre and thats it, and Handsacre was apparently not positioned with any consideration to what happens if Phase 2 did not arrive.
I've forever been impressed when a German train runs across the entire throat of a 20-odd platform station in one super-smooth movement without even a clickety clack (due to their like of pointwork with moving noses, I think that's the term). It makes sense for a low frequency system where connections are important - it allows you to run trains into opposite sides of the same island for high quality interchange.
The same thing doesn't work particularly well on the UK's system which is designed for high frequencies and short dwells as the mechanism of making connections usable rather than co-ordination on services that often only run at 0.5 or at best 1tph.
I think you are referring to double slips. Unfortunately they are falling out of favour even in places like Switzerland and the Netherlands because of derailment risks.
Germany is the wrong place for low frequency operation. Most of their states have the internal geography of the Netherlands and deserve Dutch-style regional railways, especially North Rhine-Westphalia. When you run high frequencies interchanges no longer need to be specifically timed - they just need to be consistent (so all four times an hour it's from platform 2 to platform 7 and you don't have to think about it). The Dutch don't bother enabling one side of the formation to the other at Utrecht. Credit where credit is due - there's an official proposal for Mannheim I've seen that's pretty Utrecht-like.
The problem with this approach is that, in order to achieve it, HS2 has to gather a huge amount of traffic through a sprawling network of branches, or it turns into a white elephant.
It still tries to serve a huge, disparate group of people, they are just geographically dispersed rather than dispersed by traffic type (ie. they are all longer distance passengers but from all over, rather than being different types of passengers from a smaller area).
A geographically compact solution is less reliant on its later phases to not become a debacle.
It's also a step towards eventually escaping the limitations of the existing, unsuitable system in a way that the "gather long distance passengers from everywhere" approach is not.
All HS2 has to achieve to meet its stated objective "capacity relief" is to beat the existing railway on the required journey combinations.
You could add many more stations and serve them without endangering that ultimate objective.
You don't necessarily have to go for literally all internal traffic to gain the benefits of segregation. If there was two trains per hour from Liverpool and everything else was internal, the risk of contamination of paths would be small regardles.
The problem is that the supposedly segregated system is stacked full of trains from all over.
Even with areas where there is no justification for all new infrastructure, existing infrastructure could be reworked to provide partial or total segregation.
But the problem is you can only run your timetable if you get all of them.
If you don't, because your later phases don't arrive, you are in a much worse situation than if you can fill more of your line with traffic from day one.
As it is, we now have Handsacre and thats it, and Handsacre was apparently not positioned with any consideration to what happens if Phase 2 did not arrive.
It's not a huge amount of traffic through a sprawling network. It's a normal amount of traffic through a normal sized network for a normal railway that's normal just about everywhere.
'Gather long distance passengers from everywhere' is precisely the right approach for high-speed rail. With all 18tph travelling at exactly the same speed south of Birmingham, any individual late path has negligible impact on the wider system punctuality. 'Different types of passengers from a small area' is just about the worst way to design and run a railway.
Even at partial implementation (i.e. just phase 1) you are running 10tph - that's among the best used HSL in the world.
With all 18tph travelling at exactly the same speed south of Birmingham, any individual late path has negligible impact on the wider system punctuality.
Especially given no stations between Birmingham Interchange and OOC (which presumably will be set-down only). One of the worst thing about being out of path is that the train in front stops and waits time. Not an issue on HS2 so no need to regulate trains for anything which has entered the system out of path. The signalling system does need to be clever enough to recognise when something is out of path and raise the speed from the usual 320kph (or whatever it is) to the 350kph recovery speed, not just for the late train but for the ones it has dropped behind.
'Gather long distance passengers from everywhere' is precisely the right approach for high-speed rail. With all 18tph travelling at exactly the same speed south of Birmingham, any individual late path has negligible impact on the wider system punctuality. 'Different types of passengers from a small area' is just about the worst way to design and run a railway.
Travelling at exactly the same speed out of Birmingham is achievable independently of the number of stations on the railway.
It is merely a function of the number of different stopping patterns, not the number of stops.
As noted, all the railway has to do to achieve its stated purpose is to beat the classic railway for a given journey, after accounting for frequency differences.
After all, all those exponential growth assumptions for the classic railway would fill HS2 within a couple of decades regardless!
You could stop many times between London and say Manchester and still absolutely crush the classic railway
.
But we've argued this around a great many times up to now, so we should probably just agree to disagree!
And if it could have been delivered at the cost of Hannover-Wurzberg (or any more recent scheme for that matter), that would be a great achievement.
Unfortunately, it apparently could not be.
HS2 (and any future scheme) has ended up so expensive that it has to be full or its high cost can't be justified. Without a lot of political capital, which seems to have been spent, high speed rail will probably now go no further - as depressing as that is.
'Gather long distance passengers from everywhere' is precisely the right approach for high-speed rail. With all 18tph travelling at exactly the same speed south of Birmingham, any individual late path has negligible impact on the wider system punctuality. 'Different types of passengers from a small area' is just about the worst way to design and run a railway.
Even at partial implementation (i.e. just phase 1) you are running 10tph - that's among the best used HSL in the world.
18tph, 10tph, 3tph? How many tph does anyone need to justify building a new HSR?
It seems as though some countries quite happily operate 5tph or fewer on their HSRs, but in the UK we believe that anything less than 10tph would provide such an inadequate CBR that the HSR couldn't possibly be justified.
Or have I misunderstood something?
10tph is not plucked out of a hat. What it is is the present classic-line InterCity service out of Euston. The point of HS2 is to remove these services from the WCML so other services can take their place.
That is:
3 Brum
3 Manchester
2 Liverpool
1 Scotland
1 N Wales
Obviously it isn't quite that simple (as e.g. the North Wales won't go onto HS2 and a few residual classic services will remain for the benefit, primarily, of residents of Watford, Milton Keynes, Rugby and connecting local stations), but that's where the number comes from.
The higher figure (18, was it?) includes removing some Midland Mainline and ECML services too if you build the whole thing.
It's not that a given number of trains per hour makes HS2 viable, it's that the point of HS2 is to take these services off the classic network.
10tph is not plucked out of a hat. What it is is the present classic-line InterCity service out of Euston. The point of HS2 is to remove these services from the WCML so other services can take their place.
That is:
3 Brum
3 Manchester
2 Liverpool
1 Scotland
1 N Wales
Obviously it isn't quite that simple (as e.g. the North Wales won't go onto HS2 and a few residual classic services will remain for the benefit, primarily, of residents of Watford, Milton Keynes, Rugby and connecting local stations), but that's where the number comes from.
The higher figure (18, was it?) includes removing some Midland Mainline and ECML services too if you build the whole thing.
It's not that a given number of trains per hour makes HS2 viable, it's that the point of HS2 is to take these services off the classic network.
I think the Handsacre mess means that we are probably going to have lean heavily on Birmingham traffic if HS2 is going to appear not empty (which is probably important for political reasons at this point).
We probably can't expect many more than five paths through Handsacre, once the North Wales and almost inevitable Manchester via Milton Keynes train is included.
I think only 3tph Birmingham is probably a mistake at this point - we might as well just go all in and run six or seven for a true turn up and go service. I seem to recall 4tph to Birmingham at rush hour was proposed once upon a time, a long time ago?
We probably can't expect many more than five paths through Handsacre, once the North Wales and almost inevitable Manchester via Milton Keynes train is included.
You can't however get rid of any of those ten. The capacity is needed. You can choose whether they run on HS2 or the classic line, but none of them are optional.
So which one do you drop? Or are 6 paths possible and you can have the lot bar North Wales? Did 5 just come up in conversation when there were 9tph IC out of Euston, when there was only one Liverpool?
Remember Handsacre is not for the Birmingham services, just the others.
And as detailed in various pieces of strategic analysis, essentially all of the released capacity is accounted for from a 'Day 1' in mostly providing intercity and regional connectivity which is not currently possible on the network.
This is why the loss of Manchester is such a problem, because it cuts off a significant amount of this gain for places like Stoke, Stockport and Macclesfield and other communities in the wider area.
I've forever been impressed when a German train runs across the entire throat of a 20-odd platform station in one super-smooth movement without even a clickety clack (due to their like of pointwork with moving noses, I think that's the term). It makes sense for a low frequency system where connections are important - it allows you to run trains into opposite sides of the same island for high quality interchange.
The same thing doesn't work particularly well on the UK's system which is designed for high frequencies and short dwells as the mechanism of making connections usable rather than co-ordination on services that often only run at 0.5 or at best 1tph.
I understand HS2 will be using them on the high speed switches at Interchange and Delta, which are rated at 360kph for the straight leg and 230kph for the turnout line.
I understand HS2 will be using them on the high speed switches at Interchange and Delta, which are rated at 360kph for the straight leg and 230kph for the turnout line
Almost all High Speed Lines use swing nose crossings througought. Standards in this country prohbit any discontinuity in the rail above 125mph. This is one reason (of many) we won’t see 140mph on the ECML.
And as detailed in various pieces of strategic analysis, essentially all of the released capacity is accounted for from a 'Day 1' in mostly providing intercity and regional connectivity which is not currently possible on the network.
This is why the loss of Manchester is such a problem, because it cuts off a significant amount of this gain for places like Stoke, Stockport and Macclesfield and other communities in the wider area.
All of the released capacity is accounted for from Day 1? If that's the case isn't a pretty sorry indictment of the fact that HS2 has taken so incredibly long to build! Quite apart from the horrendous Sunak savaging of it.
The UK really needs to get its house into much better order when it comes to rail travel, often including a more positive approach on this forum, ie to find reasons why we can and should make rail advances, rather than quite so much focus on finding reasons why we can't.
All of the released capacity is accounted for from Day 1? If that's the case isn't a pretty sorry indictment of the fact that HS2 has taken so incredibly long to build! Quite apart from the horrendous Sunak savaging of it.
The UK really needs to get its house into much better order when it comes to rail travel, often including a more positive approach on this forum, ie to find reasons why we can and should make rail advances, rather than quite so much focus on finding reasons why we can't.
In terms of WTT paths rather than absolute capacity, but is also entirely sensible as it should have meant that the maximum benefit could have been realised.
That could have been said at almost any time over the last 220 years or so, particularly the last 70-75 years where far more effort has been put in to not do the obvious correct thing and trying to find alternative (often vapourware) solutions. For instance, the failure to go in fully with electrification following WW2, tilt rather HSL (APT-E vs TGV001), and the recurring obsession with 140mph (and tilting) classic network operations hindering at least 2 generations of principal intercity rolling stock (91s + Mk4 hindered by both, 390s mainly 140mph running).
HS2 (and any future scheme) has ended up so expensive that it has to be full or its high cost can't be justified. Without a lot of political capital, which seems to have been spent, high speed rail will probably now go no further - as depressing as that is.
The future of high speed rail in the UK is now tied to the success of the remaining HS2 stump. If people (everywhere) in the UK see it as good and useful, they will clamour for more and the political capital will be there. It would have been much easier though if HS2 phase 2a (to Crewe) hadn't been cancelled, and if Euston were reached from the start.
After all, that is what happened in France. The planners, when LN1 was built, obviously had ideas for more LGV (and had planned LN2 and LN3 by then), but it was the overwhelming success of LN1 which enabled everything else. Because the French - even and especially those that did not live on it - could see its revolutionary potential, suddenly public support (and thus political capital) was there for all the rest.
The same happened in Austria BTW: Only when the "new Westbahn" made people aware of how good and useful a modern intercity railway could be was the following, massive rail investment programme sustainable. At the time, the quadrupling of the Westbahn was marketed to the general public as a freight upgrade - since the advent of the motorway network, intercity rail in Austria was invariably slower than the car, so few people would have imagined the usefulness for passenger rail - getting lorries of the motorway did appeal to them though (luckily, the planners still designed the new line for higher-speed passenger rail with a layout suitable for 250 kph). Indeed, Austria's "cancel HS2a" moment happened in the interim - the cancellation of the first iteration of the Semmering Base Tunnel, for purely political reasons. I am certain that it could not have happened 10 years later.
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I've forever been impressed when a German train runs across the entire throat of a 20-odd platform station in one super-smooth movement without even a clickety clack (due to their like of pointwork with moving noses, I think that's the term). It makes sense for a low frequency system where connections are important - it allows you to run trains into opposite sides of the same island for high quality interchange.
The problem in Germany is that they try to run an ever denser timetable while not adapting the infrastructure in time; hence many of their current problems. They are trying to play Swiss without actually doing so, because the Swiss design and build the infrastructure they need first, and then run the trains.
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I was merely pointing out complex interfaces carried greater deliverability risks. RRX probably couldn't avoid some of them, but HS2 has made the right decision in not having unnecessarily complex interfaces.
I think the Germans have tied themselves into knots in trying to design major stations to accommodate everywhere to everywhere movements. The Rhine-Ruhr railway network is much inferior to the Randstad network. Somewhere like Dortmund ought to be designed to Dutch principles with a small set of fixed routings. What we are seeing in Germany is just paralysis across the board. HS2 dodged a bullet in not 'doing a Dortmund' in places like Birmingham.
The "Dutchification" of Europe's railways is certainly an legitimate position and, as long as you can fit LD services into it, which in a country like Germany are really very important, very suitable for the Rhein-Ruhr-region. RRX is planned to run every 15 minutes on the core, so it is not a "low frequency" system. The resulting network would be different than the one the Germans apparently want to achieve, though.
In the end, just as in the UK - where, as has been pointed out and is obviously true, the Treasury sets the tune - it is politics that will determine the outcome of a rail network. In a federal country - and one that is even very decentralized below the state level - it will invariably look different than in a centralized country. If the politics of Nordrhein-Westfalen dictate that major cities should have direct rail connections to the "core", then that is what will happen, because the alternative will not find political support.
In any case, there is really no commonality between HS2 and RRX; nor would there be even if HS2 had an additional interface to the classic network at Birmingham.
I've forever been impressed when a German train runs across the entire throat of a 20-odd platform station in one super-smooth movement without even a clickety clack (due to their like of pointwork with moving noses, I think that's the term). It makes sense for a low frequency system where connections are important - it allows you to run trains into opposite sides of the same island for high quality interchange.
I think the smooth throat transit is more to do with the common use of slip switches, though there may be swingnoses as well in some such applications. Single and double slips are avoided if possible in modern UK layouts, but many German layouts couldn't work without them. Long multi-track diamond crossings over a wide throat, equipped with multiple slip switches were a traditional feature of many British layouts. Examples partially remain at Waterloo and Cardiff West (there are no doubt others). At Waterloo, 'West Crossings' is an artefact of a previous paired by direction approach layout on the main line before the Wimbledon flyover was built to segregate flows in the thoat.
Obviously it isn't quite that simple (as e.g. the North Wales won't go onto HS2 and a few residual classic services will remain for the benefit, primarily, of residents of Watford, Milton Keynes, Rugby and connecting local stations), but that's where the number comes from.
Why can’t the north wales services use HS2? They could build battery/bi-mode versions of the 895s , or just electrify the route. This would definitely silence people who say that HS2 doesn’t benefit Wales.
They could build battery/bi-mode versions of the 895s , or just electrify the route. This would definitely silence people who say that HS2 doesn’t benefit Wales.
Rishi Sunak pinkie promised that he'd electrify the North Wales Coast. His plan was definitely not written on the back of a conference hotel beer mat, honest guv!
Rishi Sunak pinkie promised that he'd electrify the North Wales Coast. His plan was definitely not written on the back of a conference hotel beer mat, honest guv!
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