Steamed up over plans for HS2 railway

AS someone who grew up in the age of steam and whose earliest memories are of rail journeys going to and from boarding school, firstly in Southbourne and later in Sheffield, the resurgent nostalgia for that era is hardly surprising when for many travellers a train journey was an adventure and perhaps a chance to socialise.

Nowadays most travellers look like aliens/zombies either wearing their iPods or fiddling with their laptops, tablets and iPhones and the rest buried in their reading material. Does anyone still bother to smile or gaze out at the countryside?

So what has any of this got to do with HS2? When our forebears built the original railway network which was subsequently savaged by the late Dr Beeching’s cuts, wealthy landowners and industrialists provided much of the venture capital and it was their gamble for the future success and profitability of their investment.

The taxpayers only entered into the equation when they started using the passenger services and paying fares.

This is in stark contrast to the taxpayer-funding for HS2 which is unlikely to benefit the majority of ordinary working commuters and will have no benefit whatsoever for freight users.

Does anyone really believe the cost estimates being bandied about by the transport minister?

Do the published figures (£42.5 to £50bn) cover the entire proposed routes for phases one and two or are we being given a watered down figure simply for the first stage from London to Birmingham?

People tend to have short memories and in 2026, assuming that the project is completed on time, which future transport or treasury ministers can then be held to account for something which he or she did not initiate?

By 2026 when the countryside has been despoiled and livelihoods of farmers and others ruined will those who supported this huge folly HS2 be given knighthoods and paid scandalous bonuses or sent to Coventry by their fellow citizens, I wonder?

Will the HS2 rolling stock be made in China, Germany, France or Japan or will the engineers in Doncaster, Crewe and Swindon be resurrected from their graves to build a British railway engineering triumph?

Has anyone else fallen for the spin from the transport ministry experts that it would take 13 years of disruption to upgrade the existing railway main lines on the East and West Coast?

Funny coincidence of timing, wouldn’t you say?

If any reader is still in doubt after reading this I must declare that I am not in favour of HS2!

From: PG Kirk, York.

JACK Blanchard’s item on HS2 (Yorkshire Post, October 30) needed a bit more research. Travellers on the route currently proposed would not be in York in an hour and 20 mins. They would be in Church Fenton, effectively “York Parkway”.

Travellers would then have to carry on into York by bus, car or taxi, or catch a connection from Church Fenton.

There is nothing wrong with the concept of HS2, but there is a major difficulty with the chosen route. That is the insistence that HS2 has to go to and from London. Why?

London is full, it’s a bottleneck, an impediment. One of the main reasons people go to London is to cross it to go somewhere else. Rail travellers from Europe to Birmingham, say, would still have to disembark in St Pancras and travel to Euston. A short distance on a map, maybe, but a challenge with luggage and with a connection to catch.

What is needed is a rail bypass of London. A vast improvement in the proposal would be to connect HS2 to Eurostar, somewhere north of the Thames, and route it clear of London before it branches off to the West and the North.

From: Kerry Bagshaw, Leyburn, North Yorkshire.

A RECENT trip to France took us parallel to the new Tours-Bordeaux TGV route – under construction. Quite apart from the validity of the case against the bogus financial projections for HS2, there seems to have been little acknowledgement of the huge infrastructure and environmental disruption this project would cause.

The TGV route is a much smaller undertaking, within a far larger and more rural landscape.

But the necessary construction of a vast network of associated over and underpasses, tunnels and bridges has caused an extraordinary measure of scarring and obstruction across a broad swathe of the country.

How much more of a nightmare will be created across the British Midlands, should this unnecessary project come to fruition?