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This would be, what, the fifth broken promise for Leeds in the past 25 years? We were promised electric trains, Eurostar, a tram system, a trolleybus system after the tram was cancelled, and now HS2's eastern leg.

It's pretty impressive, and totally on form for Grayling, to manage to lose an election that was rigged in his favour.

My understanding is that the English green movement is a relative embarrassment for other European green activists because of their obsession with opposing HS2, incidentally.

Not for nothing, but isn't LBA too far uphill for a meaningful spur off either the Ilkley or the Harrogate line?

I believe this is how it works on Northern too; the CIS screens would display a Harrogate line train as the "xx48 to Poppleton' to dissuade people taking the slow way to York.

I imagine that's because Evergreen 3 made it impossible to find somewhere to suggest piloting his absolutely bonkers "replace the trains with bus lanes" proposal.

If anything, the extra financial measures to help the country through the pandemic has kind of exposed the "national credit card" argument as a myth even for most Tories.

I'll believe the first when I see it; this would be the third proposal since 2000?

It doesn't look too much changed from the previous plans; you can see the 1855 station building in the background, although it looks like the mini-bus station plans have been amended. This makes sense, given the news is that the news since the budget has focused a lot on the 1855 building...

Even if implied repeal was a viable strategy, the Paris Agreement was ratified before the Phase 1 Act was given royal assent, so that way is out of the window. The long hybrid bill process will probably also make judges wary of striking down the law like that.

After the South Yorkshire section got moved away from Meadowhall, the non-Sheffield councils started pushing for a parkway station, but I'm not sure if anything's happened on that front recently.

The current government has a rather dim view of long-term thinking, though; having stub tunnels at OOC for HS2 to link to HS1 if it was ever needed was a rounding error in the budget but was ditched pretty early on.

For some reason, Boris Johnson really likes vanity projects to be near tons of unexplored WW2 ordnance: first Boris Island, then the Irish Sea Bridge. One wonders if there’s still some bombs under the waters of the Thames near the Embankment.

I can see Sunak saying something like "we said we would invest in the North and we will, we said we would invest in the towns left behind and we will, so we are bringing forward plans to restore the railway line between Skipton and Colne that was cut over half a century ago". Or something like...

I think Skipton–Colne has more of a chance than some people are intimating, not because of whether it would be value for money, but because the politics are in its favour. The new NPR/HS2 minister does have Colne in his patch, and he's been pretty vocal about it in the past. Skipton's MP...

Hydrogen is just the late-2010s version of bionic duckweed. Also, there does come a point where BCR model needs to be given less weighting because the intangibles (and some tangibles) are such that not doing anything would be worse in the long run; see also, Pacer replacement.

If Crossrail 2 is still on the cards for an opening around 2030, a clever person would piggyback on that to provide a travelator within the Euston St Pancras station box. As far as I'm aware, Crossrail 2 intend to have a new ticket hall in St Pancras underneath the Eurostar departure lounge...

Re Meadowhall: isn't Midland to Euston now going to be slower than it would've been with a change at Meadowhall? Sheffield City Council are no strangers to PR blunders (just ask anyone about the trees), but HS2 to Midland was a whopper of a bad decision. Anyone could've told you that Midland...

There was a plan to send most of the terminators up the WCML to Tring, which could've relieved pressure on the Euston throat during reconstruction. Alas, I believe the boiled egg cut it a few years ago.

Quite a bit of TfL’s funding woes is due to a mixture of Khan being boxed in by the fare freeze promise and political slap-fighting between opposing parties in Westminster and City Hall.