The UK is exposing very little of its workforce to great tunnelling projects, because very little of HS2 is about tunnelling, and most of the rest of the technology is being bought in anyway.
This repeats an old pattern. The UK used to have a nationalised rail system with world-class R&D. The R&D was effectively given away when the system was privatised, and then the technology was bought in when it was needed later - from foreign companies which were now charging the UK for IP it had developed at home.
Even if that weren't true, the UK would be competing in a tiny space with even larger projects - like the Brenner Base Tunnel, which is currently burrowing through 55km of solid rock under the Alps.
The reality is there is very little real payback in terms of jobs and future opportunities - certainly much less than spending the money on world class broadband infrastructure and technology training.
The infuriating thing about HS2 is that it's basically just pork for party donors dressed up as a strategic and patriotic wonder - because the ruling class just can't deal with the fact that the 19th century is over.
Meanwhile the strategic areas the UK is actually a significant player in - including plenty of science and technology, and not a little engineering, but also the arts, finance, and law - are being starved of investment, opportunity, and effective management.
The thing that I find most humourous about British Rail - as a non brit, former colonial subject, who lives in London - is that they literally invented high speed rail, then lost the ultimate prize to the French (i.e. France ran ahead with it, electrified it then rolled it out. I find this incredibly amusing as there's still a certain portion of English society with a huge chip on their shoulders vis a vis France).
There's another humorous aspect about the British rail system: It really is mostly state owned and operated.
Just not (mostly) the British government (though the UK government also regularly has to step in to take over for failing operating companies...)
E.g. the Dutch, German, Italian, French, Quebec (via Keolis; a joint venture between French owned SNCF and a Quebec pension fund), Hong Kong governments all have significant ownership in UK rail franchises. Only a handful of franchises are run by purely privately owned operating companies.
It also runs with a third to a quarter of the relative subsidy compared to France and Germany, so maybe the UK is getting the better end of the bargain!
Also, these are only the train operating companies, the rail and infrastructure itself is owned by Network Rail, which is state owned (and by the UK, not France!)
Having used the rail systems elsewhere, I'd happily see an increase of subsidies far more extensive than that if it got us a rail system more fit for purpose.
Alas, no government since privatisation has wanted to increase subsidy, hence the continual above-inflation fare rises (though admittedly smaller than under BR!).
Not really, the TGV network makes a profit and the fares are about half the price of our shit trains. Also their most expensive line has about 50 bridges and tunnels through much more rugged landscape than the midlands and cost 5 times less per km than HS2.
Differences in geography, making it harder to effectively lay down HS tracks? Further complicated by old rights of way, surrounded by built up environment, especially in the cities?
It's not like the French TGV/Thalys or the German ICE would run HS right into and out of the cities either.
Maybe in China and Japan, but hey, they are different.
It's purely semantics, but I think in this case it would be the "Quebecois" government. A side note, does anybody know what the name for that form of a country/culture/language is? ex: French for France or Italian for Italy.
Also as a non Brit who lives in the UK, I've always felt that the massive chip on the shoulder was regarding the Germans not the French but maybe it's just the people I've met
No chips against Andorra, Belarus, Bolivia, Burundi, Central African Republic, Chad, Congo, Guatemala, Ivory Coast ,Kyrgyzstan, Liechtenstein, Luxembourg, Mali, Marshall Islands, Monaco, Mongolia, Paraguay, Sao Tome and Principe, Sweden, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan and Vatican City, then?
I can't think of a country that would be even close.
Previous world powers came to pre-eminence when less of the world was known and later world powers are nuclear and haven't really directly invaded, fought or attacked like the British did.
This map brings it home more than most https://i.redd.it/75nqzhfp42r21.png and it only covers a single instance for many of those countries, the British (English first, rest of UK later) and the French spent most of a millennia beating each other up when they had no one else to fight - I mean Churchill gave orders to shoot French military if necessary months before the end of WW2 (between VE and VJ day) during the Levant Crisis.
The UK makes fun of basically all Western European countries, the problem is about half of the population think it’s a joke, and half think it’s insightful analysis.
Am not impressed with the Transrapid-derivative they listed first. In Germany it failed for a reason. In Shanghai it's operating at a loss, has impractical cabin layout for the purpose (Airport shuttle, luggage/baggage) and hasn't been expanded as initially planned. Why is that?
It's not awful if you'd need to build new rail links into the city centre anyway (e.g., due to capacity) and you have little onward long-distance travel. Tokyo–Osaka may well be a viable route for that, but there certainly aren't many.
(In the Shanghai case it's practically laughable, because it's such a short journey the top speed is practically irrelevant: it spends half its time accelerating/braking)
Sure, I tried to make the focus of my comment on the rarely talked about benefit of skilling people up as a positive externality, rather than to give credit to HS2 specifically, but I probably didn't do this well enough.
Skilling up people in the world of STEM, finance, arts are all as important, if not more so than tunnelling.
> On [public ownership of] our railway, the East Coast line was run in public ownership from 2009 to 2014. It had 91% customer satisfaction and returned £1 billion to the Treasury. (Today, half of our rail services are run by foreign state owned companies.)
In 2015–2018, the three year period of VTEC, customer satisfaction was generally unchanged from East Coast (though went down at the very end) and £800m was returned to the Treasury. Per year, that's 30% higher than the nationalised East Coast returned (and okay, ~£160m of the £800m ultimately came from Stagecoach paying more money than VTEC had operating profit, but from a taxpayer point-of-view that's irrelevant).
What is different now compared to before? Fares have increased faster than inflation, trains are overcrowded, the seats are a lot more cramped, just as worn and dirty, no faster than before and the sandwiches are still as bad as the ones you get in petrol stations.
Over the last ten years of BR, fares increased 102% versus RPI of 62% (thus increasing 25% in real terms based on RPI; CPI didn't exist till the final five years of BR).
Over the past ten years, fares have increased 40% versus RPI of 31% (thus increasing 7% in real terms based on RPI, or 16% based on CPI).
Most of the increases were during the tenure of a government that wanted to privatise the railways and believed they should be self funded and obviously would not want these price rises to occur once the railways were privatised.
Increased car ownership causes congestion which makes travelling by car impractical for long journeys and increased house prices force people to commute from further out?
This repeats an old pattern. The UK used to have a nationalised rail system with world-class R&D. The R&D was effectively given away when the system was privatised, and then the technology was bought in when it was needed later - from foreign companies which were now charging the UK for IP it had developed at home.
Even if that weren't true, the UK would be competing in a tiny space with even larger projects - like the Brenner Base Tunnel, which is currently burrowing through 55km of solid rock under the Alps.
The reality is there is very little real payback in terms of jobs and future opportunities - certainly much less than spending the money on world class broadband infrastructure and technology training.
The infuriating thing about HS2 is that it's basically just pork for party donors dressed up as a strategic and patriotic wonder - because the ruling class just can't deal with the fact that the 19th century is over.
Meanwhile the strategic areas the UK is actually a significant player in - including plenty of science and technology, and not a little engineering, but also the arts, finance, and law - are being starved of investment, opportunity, and effective management.