As I've said on other threads, there's a remarkable disconnect that people have between "the rules that apply to HS2" and "the rules that apply to every other railway project" - e.g. the pearl clutching at the idea of HS2 cutting down some trees and compulsorily purchasing some houses but people seem perfectly relaxed about doing the same when it comes to following some long abandoned alignment originally built by Victorian speculators - people argue in favour of electrification of the Chiltern line to permit fast accelerating EMUs but sneer at the idea of HS2 because "who wants to get from Birmingham to London faster?".
So, if millions of people start working from home then I'd respectfully suggest that pretty much any railway project might as well be postponed - funny how the potentially huge drop in passenger numbers isn't a reason to give up on Platforms 15/16 at Manchester Piccadilly or more capacity at Welwyn or re-opening a line to some small rural place like Wisbech though, eh?
I'd be interested to see someone suggest that there's no point in re-introducing direct London trains to places like Huddersfield or of electrifying the Midland Main Line or having a proper service to places like Okehampton because the large numbers of people working from home mean that passenger numbers across the country will plummet - but I doubt it. Generally Coronavirus (and the after effects of this pandemic) seem to just be a justification for people to argue in favour of what they always argued in favour of.
According to many posts on here, if you cancel HS2, the money for it actually ceases to exist, since it consists of (very cheap) borrowing against future revenues.
That's my understanding - HS2 will mean significantly more seats on the London - Birmingham - Manchester/ Leeds corridors (both the seats on a 400m long HS2 train and all of the extra seats that you can sell to passengers at places like Milton Keynes where much of the capacity through the station is taken up by non-stop services). If you have no HS2 then you lose all of that additional ticketing income - a lot of people are looking at the price tag in isolation rather than seeing the bigger picture.
THat's not to say that there won't be a drop in passenger numbers across the country - maybe there will - it feels far too early to make decisions over a hundred billion pound project until we are back on a more "regular" footing - but passenger numbers have gone up and up despite over twenty years of electronic communication - we must have had video conferencing for at least fifteen years and yet passenger numbers have still increased - obviously they can't increase forever but people would have been making similar arguments against things like HS2 twenty years ago.
HS2 isn't isolation though - if demand does go significantly down then we'll have to turn all of those "LNER/GWR should extend all of their five coach IET to nine or ten coaches" threads into ones suggesting that they shouldn't have ordered any nine coach ones because even the five coach trains aren't that busy - instead of suggesting we re-double lines we'll argue in favour of singling some existing double track!
