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What I don’t understand is why Curzon Street is not being built to connect HS2 to the Crosscountry route - are the Birmingham-Edinburgh trains not going to connect up with Bristol like the existing CrossCountry trains?

Restrict the rail-property developers to letting out their properties for the first twenty years, and Bob’s your uncle.

What do you have against it?

And you think the two are the same do you?

What I don’t understand is why they didn’t privatize the London Underground. I’d it because the political elite in London want their own city to have the delights of socialism while the rest of the country has to experience capitalism? In all seriousness though, I really think it would have...

Hear Hear.

At a bare minimum all the mainlines are trunk routes should have been electrified as well as all suburban commuter routes. By Mainline I mean: Midland Main line Chiltern GWML down to Penzance Cross Country All Transpenine Express routes Edinburgh- Aberdeen and Edinburgh to Inverness South Wales...

In France, SNCF makes money, in Germany, Deutschebahn makes money, in Spain Renfe makes money. In Japan, private companies there make money, and seldom require subsidies. Closer to home, the Edinburgh trams that opened in 2014 made a profit two years earlier than envisaged. Thank Are you...

It’s been two decades since rail privatisation in the UK, but unlike in the golden age of private railways before 1914, I don’t see any competition, any train company startups. There are only a handful of open access operators, and whenever a new line is to be opened, it’s always the...

I would rather break up the big franchises along trunk mainlines, and have more competition, either between franchises or involving open access operators. If we break up big intercity franchises, we could do it so that there’s ultimate duplication, and say, at least two companies...

One question is what will happen to the Crosscountry franchise - the central core of which runs from Birmingham to Leeds. Will the longer distance trains (ie Bristol-Edinburgh) be diverted onto HS2? If so, I hope it results in the electrification of the rest of the Crosscountry route.

Other countries have massive interchange stations in places that were previously in the inner-suburbs, if not out of town, and often it’s the best decision - more space to build big and have the right capacity. These new ‘mega-stations’ will always have better connections than the old termini...

I think that by only terminating HS2 at Old Oak Common they are missing out on a massive opportunity - they should create a single Hautbahnhof for the Chiltern Main Line (via the New North Main Line), the GWML, the WCML as well as HS2. Only Crossrail and Overground should continue into Euston...

But surely making Manchester a through station on the route to Glasgow would be way cheaper than making it a terminus of it’s own branch line? Termini require multiple platforms - a through station, only two. In China intermediate stations on HS lines are almost never built in the old city...

That is why I hate the fact that we don’t do joined up planning back in the UK and that we couldn’t have somehow done the obvious thing and plan HS1 and 2 and Crossrail all in one. If this were China, or even Berlin, I’m sure that both lines would have been planned together, and rather than...

Here are a few reservations that I have about the current HS2 plans. Where shall I get started? The idea of having separate branches for Manchester and Glasgow rather than a through line connecting them both is just absurd. Why would you just want to allow travellers from London to reach...

For those of you who say that bilingual place name signs = imposition of the Welsh Language, and that having Radyr spelt the Welsh way being more visible than spelt the English way, I say this. IT'S JUST A NAME. THE WELSH NAME IS ONLY ONE LETTER DIFFERENT FROM THE ENGLISH NAME, ANY IDIOT...

So what's your opinion of HS2 then?

Imagine an elevator in an apartment block, like the one in my own appartment block, here in Nanjing, China. Now, if you were to study the journeys made by each person using that elevator, you will pretty soon notice that nearly all the journeys either begin or end on the ground floor...

As you will all know, the West London Line is currently used by London Overground trains from Clapham Junction to Willesden Junction, and Southern services from Miltern Keynes to East Croydon. But is there an opportunity being missed involving the line's connection to Waterloo via the South...