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You can make an argument that the Y shape was ‘ridiculous’ or ‘a complete joke’ (to quote you). I would even suggest the eastern arm was not as well developed as the western arm. But you are arguing it should have been a trident, one of the arms of which should serve a small target audience...

None of this is based on facts and figures. Unfortunately for your thesis they don’t lie.

That’s all very interesting but the socio-economic and geographical reach of the two respective cities is represented in the the passenger figures. Manchester Piccadilly: 27 million users Liverpool Lime Street: 14 million users We can also look at the flow figures London Euston-Manchester...

Good point about Blackburn! I did notice you also added a comment about Huddersfield. My reasoning about this is that with the completed western leg London-Manchester Piccadilly was estimated to be 1hr 8min. Leeds-London journey time is 2hrs. Leeds is about 25 minutes closer to Huddersfield...

You’ve taken Wigan and Blackburn off Manchester (fair enough), but you haven’t taken the likes of St Helens, Widnes, Runcorn off Liverpool. They’re just as likely to use Warrington, Crewe or Wigan depending on direction of travel as Blackburn is likely to use Preston. Not that it really matters...

If I could like this I would! Quoting the About the Author statement: Andrew Gilligan is Senior Fellow at Policy Exchange. He was previously a journalist with the Telegraph, the BBC’s Today programme, the Evening Standard and the Sunday Times, and is a former Journalist of the Year at the...

Liverpool Lime Street had 14.4 million entries/1.0 million interchanges in the latest figures. Manchester Piccadilly had 27.4 million entries/2.1 million interchanges. In these figures Manchester has broadly double the Liverpool figure, which is because its region has twice the population...

Oldham, Rochdale, and Bolton (plus the likes of Huddersfield) would all be served by HS2 via direct links to Manchester. How many towns have direct links to Liverpool where going via Liverpool would be the quickest route? Not to mention it also directly served Manchester Airport which is one of...

The fact that Greater Manchester is twice the size of Liverpool City Region tells you why HS2 targeted that city.

Greater Manchester has a population of just over 3 million. Liverpool City Region is just over 1.5 million.

Greater Manchester has double the population of Liverpool City Region.

Or harder because a) all the low hanging fruit is done already and b) the WCML is now at capacity at 125mph top speed. Increasing it to 140mph reduces capacity in a mixed railway environment.

That’s all great but just for starters: If you remove all West Midlands bound trains from the WCML you remove opportunities for intermediate journeys -eg Milton Keynes or Northampton. HS2 will enable more of these to run. As I said in my previous post they spent £15 billion in the late...

But you are claiming HS2 is most expensive railway project in the world, when adjusted for inflation it’s clearly not. If you think simply upgrading the Chiltern line would achieve the same objectives as HS2 that’s great but all the evidence would suggest otherwise. The WCML upgrade in 2008...

Said those complaining about Crossrail. Where are they now?

Even basic maths tells me 140 miles divided by 100 billion does not equal 1 billion per mile. It is £710 million per miles. Crossrail cost £19 billion. I’m unsure which year that is priced against but this was in 2021. That’s 25 billion in 2025 prices which equates to over one billion per...

Everywhere from Cornwall to Northumberland and Kent to Shropshire, and most areas in between. You have to remember at the same time he cancelled Phase 2 he also announced that nearly £4bn would be ‘reallocated’ to transport schemes in six northern city regions and £3bn for upgraded and...

Millions of so called middle Englanders, plus a lot in Scotland who complained HS2 was only ever 100s of miles from Scotland, and especially Wales who felt they were being done over by the Barnett formula calculations.

But the costs are all related because it’s one project. Phase 2 didn’t get cancelled because Phase 2 was expensive, it got cancelled because Sunak was making a political decision to punish the entire project.

And HS2 is running through two cities, with very large stations (11 and 6 platforms) being built in the centre of both! An a third station being built underground, next to and over an operating mainline in London.