The true cost of HS2

Last Thursday, I travelled from Glasgow back to London on Avanti West Coast.

The train was a 9 car Pendalino set. Or in English, one of the non-upgraded sets that had two extra carriages put in the middle of the set so to increase capacity.

A nine car set has just one carriage of unreserved seats, coach C, meaning eight other coaches are for those who book in advance, so pay the lowest prices, but get seat reservations as a matter of course, and those who turn up on the day, pay top whack, get to stand in the vestibules.

After Preston, people walked up and down hoping to find an empty seat. But there were none, none free even in First Class.

Maybe it would have been not so bad with an eleven car set, but truth is, the West Coast Mail Line (WCML) is at capacity. There is no more room for services, especially between the London to Crewe section.

Two decades ago, £10 billion was spent on upgrade work, and at the end, when the money ran out, there was none left to upgrade the signals to allow for 140mph running.

Any upgrade work in the future will inflict a decade of delays and closures, with no real significant increase in capacity.

This was forseen, of course, and HS2 was planned to take the expresses off the WCML onto HS2 to free up capacity for more stopping services and freight.

The last Government imposed so many design changes, they pulled the plug on the Birmingham to Crewe and the branch to Leeds, leaving it as a high speed branch line between London and Birmingham.

HS2 was no perfect. It was expensive. But most of the high costs, tunneling through the Cotswolds, has been done, the land for the line to Crewe paid for, and work scoped and construction companies chosen.

Now abandoned.

I would not travel on wither the WCML or East Coast Main Line (ECML) without seat reservations.

And cities like Leicester, Nottingham, Northampton and so on, will not now get extra direct services, and have to suffer full trains on the main line.

So it goes, so it goes.

HS1 was built under budget and on time, and now vegetation on either side of the line is now mature, so the line is almost invisible, while the M20 beside it is clogged with traffic.

Governments seem to like spending money on road schemes, sees them as investments, but railways and public transport is "subsidy".