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Michael Byng is like an ice-cream salesman to the anti types. They love bringing up his claim that the true budget is £100bn (+£30bn for CR2, £39bn for NPR, etc...) based on his analysis. So I looked up his figures and said "yeah, I've looked at them and his analysis is incredibly flawed" based...

There's a video of someone driving around Leeds city centre in the late 1980s (back before Briggate was pedestrianised), and his passenger points up to the viaduct going over what's now, uh, Viaduct (the gay bar), and he says "that'll be all electric soon". Thirty years later, and it's still...

If I was being cynical, I would suggest that the Greens’ opposition to HS2 is due to the fact that policy was decided when their (former) leader lived in Somers Town.

Hence my joke about other infamous bad stats. :P

Someone's gonna point at the 0.4% drop in passenger numbers in London (due entirely to intra-city traffic in East London falling) and point that to a reason why rail passenger numbers have peaked, and besides, global warming ended in 1998 and the Tories/Labour are gonna win a majority at the...

As opposed to the current, of course, where the unions wouldn't dream of striking on a year's worth of Saturdays. /s

Also, Hyperloop just wouldn't work in the UK unless you're subjecting your passengers to roller-coaster style accelerations.

As far as I'm aware, the DC lines don't interact with the WCML at all save for the Euston throat and a connection to the Down Fast at Watford Junction.

Also, if I'm being frightfully honest, a "high-speed TransPennine line" is probably overkill, given the distances between Leeds, Manchester, and Liverpool mean that you won't be spending that much time at "high speed". An express line capable of 125mph would probably satisfy TfN's aspirations of...

Ah yes, high speed broadband will surely be the panacea to rising passenger numbers, as will smart railways on the blockchain duck cloud. I thought the idea that videoconferencing obviates the need for infrastructure spending went the way of bionic duckweed, and for the same reasons.

Another interesting thing is that although people complain constantly that the HS2 cost keeps "spiralling out of control", it hasn't actually received a real-terms increase in its budget since McLoughlin announced the "£42.6bn in 2011 terms" budget in 2013; £7.5bn is adding the rolling stock...

All of the major rail unions are fully in favour of HS2 (modulo general concerns regarding construction blacklisting and franchising), and given the rail industry is heavily unionised, I think they can be taken as representative of the views of the railway workers…

The May timetable fiasco is directly related to the lack of work on the Castlefield corridor (which has been on Grayling's desk for 1108 days…), and may end up stymying Northern's promise of delivering the "Northern Connect" services.

Labour were useless under Blair for transport outside London.

I'd make a joke about putting the digital railway on the blockchain of ideas, if Grayling wouldn't take it 100% seriously.

The public sentiment is in favour of a lot of things, doesn’t mean it’s the right thing to do. As the old Peep Show quote goes, people like Coldplay and voted for the Nazis, you can’t trust them.

I should certainly hope I read it; I wrote it! It's meant to be for people who aren't as au fait with railway politics who, for example, were made uneasy by the Dispatches broadcast.

Well, Sheffield could be better served by HS2, but they threw their toys out of the pram and demanded a HS2 station in the city centre without anywhere to put it. Now they get slower trains than if they had to change at Meadowhall (which would've provided a better service for Barnsley and...

The Ordsall Chord and Platform 15 and 16 were part of the same package; the intention was to build the chord first to allow for a gradual increase in capacity between 2016 and 2018. Regardless, TWAOs should be approved within six months of landing on the desk; that it hasn't happened in over...

That was Fraser. Castle approved closures too, but they started to go back down to the pre-Report mean under her.