Passengers 'satisfied' with railways (From Bicester Advertiser)

I use the Chiltern line a lot, and I have to admit they do an excellent job. Stations are always clean and smart, staff are friendly and helpful, and the trains pretty much run on time.

I'm not surprised they are rated as one of the best train providers in the country - if only the east and west coast main line providers could do the same!

What surprises me though is why, with such a brilliant train service from London to Birmingham, the government feels the need to spend £35,000,000,000 of our money building a competing route which will get you there 20 minutes quicker, at probably double the fare?

Severian wrote:
I use the Chiltern line a lot, and I have to admit they do an excellent job. Stations are always clean and smart, staff are friendly and helpful, and the trains pretty much run on time. I'm not surprised they are rated as one of the best train providers in the country - if only the east and west coast main line providers could do the same! What surprises me though is why, with such a brilliant train service from London to Birmingham, the government feels the need to spend £35,000,000,000 of our money building a competing route which will get you there 20 minutes quicker, at probably double the fare?

Because the existing routes will hit capacity some time before 2020 and a new high speed route is probably the least disruptive way of delivering a step-change in capacity. It will also deliver far more than faster journey times on London-Birmingham, it will also give quicker and easier journeys between London and the North, Heathrow and the Midlands/North, the West Country and the Midlands/North, and Paris/Brussels and the Midlands/North.

Back on topic; the 84% satisfaction with Cross Country is misleading in the context of our region. XC operate former regional services through the Midlands which are by and large very good. THe section through Oxford, up to Manchester/NEwcastle
, is atrocious, usually overcrowded and late with hiss-poor catering. I suspect satisfaction ratings for separate parts of the XC network would give widely differing results.

The new line will double the capacity of the system just in time.
(If the Nimby types would only stop the delaying tactics.)

More apologists for HS2. The new line will cost a VAST amount of taxpayers money, and will deliver very very little.

It is a political project designed to make some MPs feel as if they are doing something, and will not deliver much more than that. On an economic basis it makes absolutely NO sense whatsoever to spend that amount of money.

If capacity is an issue (as you claim) why are we not first considering longer trains, more frequent trains, double-decker trains etc. (have you ever travelled on trains in Holland?).

HS2 has absolutely nothing to do with capacity - it has everything to do with allowing MPs from Birmingham and NW constituencies to get home quicker on a Friday night.

On the key north-south corridors that HS2 is designed to primarily relieve, Virgin are running 9-11 car trains and East Coast 9-cars. As the practicable limit for train length is 12 cars, you can see how we will hit capacity soon.

Frequencies are already at a level which are denying the opportunity for decent regional services to places like Nuneaton and Lincoln as capacity is mainly given over to fast non-stop services to the north. Frequencies on key flows are already higher than on the continent, with Manchester and Leeds running at 20-min headways six days a week, and Leeds running every 30 min.

Double-deckers are a non-starter given the UK's restricitve loading gauge, and could only possibly work on routes with no tunnels. THere is a fair chance that the captive high-speed trains on HS2 will be double deck as HS2 will be built to continental gauge.

NOne of the above measures, when applied to the classic network, would address the ludicrous market share short-haul airlines have on flows like London-Manchester and Birmingham-Brussels, the latter of which rail hasn't got a hope of winning with current journey times and connections. Even links to long-haul flights at Heathrow are pathetic, as many of them involve catching a bus from Reading. We need a decent modern network linking the midlands and north to Heathrow and the Channel Tunnel, and if you think HS2 will be expensive and disruptive, try adapting the classic network to acheive all this while trying to run trains on it!

King Joke wrote:
On the key north-south corridors that HS2 is designed to primarily relieve, Virgin are running 9-11 car trains and East Coast 9-cars. As the practicable limit for train length is 12 cars, you can see how we will hit capacity soon. Frequencies are already at a level which are denying the opportunity for decent regional services to places like Nuneaton and Lincoln as capacity is mainly given over to fast non-stop services to the north. Frequencies on key flows are already higher than on the continent, with Manchester and Leeds running at 20-min headways six days a week, and Leeds running every 30 min. Double-deckers are a non-starter given the UK's restricitve loading gauge, and could only possibly work on routes with no tunnels. THere is a fair chance that the captive high-speed trains on HS2 will be double deck as HS2 will be built to continental gauge. NOne of the above measures, when applied to the classic network, would address the ludicrous market share short-haul airlines have on flows like London-Manchester and Birmingham-Brussels, the latter of which rail hasn't got a hope of winning with current journey times and connections. Even links to long-haul flights at Heathrow are pathetic, as many of them involve catching a bus from Reading. We need a decent modern network linking the midlands and north to Heathrow and the Channel Tunnel, and if you think HS2 will be expensive and disruptive, try adapting the classic network to acheive all this while trying to run trains on it!

OR you could use Birmingham and Manchester as hub airports, and remove this ridiculous situation where people have to travel hundreds of miles from the north of England to get onto a plane, and vice versa.

OR the businesses in the north of England could learn to video-conference, so they don't need to keep travelling to/from London every day.

By that logic we could introduce teleconferencing and grass over the M1. You can't conduct sales calls over teleconference, neither can you go up to uni, visit relations, have a week in the Lake District or go to a gig in Manchester by teleconference.

THere will always be travelling going on, and at the moment nowhere near enough of it happening by train. We need more trains and more tracks to run them on, and HS2 is probably the best way to do it.

Having a long haul hub at Birmingham airport won't stop people flying 300 miles to the continent, but a high-speed rail network will.