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The main rationale for building HS2 is that the West Coast Main Line is close to capacity. They aren't going to close the WCML. I believe the plan is to use the

• growse 13y ago
  That's because the sexy story here is 'politicians spending money on glamour projects', and not something dull like 'out of capacity rail line desperately needs relief'. Nobody mentions the rationale, because it's practically impossible to intelligently argue against. It's like the world's greatest strawman.
  • Silhouette 13y ago
    Sorry, maybe I'm misunderstanding, but are you claiming that it's practically impossible to make intelligent arguments against HS2? Or just that it's practically impossible to argue that the WCML is running out of capacity (without necessarily assuming HS2 is the way to fix that)?
    • jacalata 13y ago
      I think he meant it is practically impossible to argue intelligently against the need to add capacity to the WCML, so nobody mentions it because they would rather argue against the strawman of 'policians are only doing HS2 to look good'.
    • growse 13y ago
      The latter. There's plenty of sensible criticism to be made of the current project plan, but it's really hard to get away from the fact that we're out of capacity. The quickest, cheapest and least disruptive way of fixing that is to build a new railway line. At the moment, we just have some ridiculously rabid partisan public 'debate' where you are either in favour of the HS2 in its current entirety, or you think we shouldn't be doing it at all. There's a huge spectrum of insight that's being lost, and that's what makes me a sad panda.