6 ms·

>if you're building a new line, you may as well make it high speed; All things being equal, sure, but a high speed line is going to be more expensive, speciall

>if you're building a new line, you may as well make it high speed; All things being equal, sure, but a high speed line is going to be more expensive, specially at the speeds required. I'm not sure that any potential changes in working patterns given covid-19 will be taken into consideration but they should. In any case, we'll no doubt fall into sunk cost fallacy territory soon and it will be £100Bn before this is done

gmac 6y ago
Definitely agree — I suspect the (highly suspect) CBA that was used to justify HS2 would come out a lot less positive with the amount of extra home-working we can expect post-COVID-19.
- M2Ys4U 6y ago
  Even if people work from home more, we will still want to shift freight from road to rail, and the WCML is full.
improbable22 6y ago
>if you're building a new line, you may as well make it high speed; I think the thing to understand here is that mixing speeds is awful for capacity. There are some fast trains now, and everything else has to be scheduled around them, which means they each eat up many slots, to clear the line a safe distance ahead. There's lots of demand for more slow trains, which can't be run. If you built a new slow line, you would still have this problem. And the slow trains want to stop many places, so you can't build the line through open fields, and building through towns is really expensive. So you build a new fast line. And then it may as well go a little faster than the existing fast trains. But this increment isn't the main point. Or at least that's my understanding. I don't doubt the price will grow. I have also heard there may have been other not-quite-as-fast options, refurbishing a disused line instead?
M2Ys4U 6y ago
>All things being equal, sure, but a high speed line is going to be more expensive, specially at the speeds required. It's actually not that much more expensive...

gmac 6y ago

Definitely agree — I suspect the (highly suspect) CBA that was used to justify HS2 would come out a lot less positive with the amount of extra home-working we can expect post-COVID-19.

M2Ys4U 6y ago
Even if people work from home more, we will still want to shift freight from road to rail, and the WCML is full.

improbable22 6y ago

>if you're building a new line, you may as well make it high speed; I think the thing to understand here is that mixing speeds is awful for capacity. There are some fast trains now, and everything else has to be scheduled around them, which means they each eat up many slots, to clear the line a safe distance ahead. There's lots of demand for more slow trains, which can't be run. If you built a new slow line, you would still have this problem. And the slow trains want to stop many places, so you can't build the line through open fields, and building through towns is really expensive. So you build a new fast line. And then it may as well go a little faster than the existing fast trains. But this increment isn't the main point. Or at least that's my understanding. I don't doubt the price will grow. I have also heard there may have been other not-quite-as-fast options, refurbishing a disused line instead?

M2Ys4U 6y ago

>All things being equal, sure, but a high speed line is going to be more expensive, specially at the speeds required. It's actually not that much more expensive...