United Kingdom

HS2 is the investment in making the existing network better. From the article:

That is because the current 125mph expresses devour capacity on the network the Victorians bequeathed us. Local, regional and freight services are all constricted so that passengers can travel between Sheffield and London in two hours. Get them off the tracks, and connectivity is transformed.

Fuck building new lines designed for speed, invest that money in making the existing network better.

Building new, modern railway lines is one way to improve the network. I don't really understand why anyone who advocates for investment in the railways has a problem with building new lines. I agree that they shouldn't be private anymore and that we should massively increase funding, but building new rail and replacing old rail with new rail seems like a great way to improve the network

The rail industry was asked nearly 20 years ago what would best increase capacity in our existing infrastructure and this is what they cam up with. Faster, more frequent services on a high speed line that frees up paths on old mainlines for more local services and more rail freight, as these are at capacity right now

Sure, you can argue that it wasn't a perfect plan, but it's what we have. Framing it as "high speed travel to London" is what the press have been doing for 15 years and is disingenuous.

Of course it doesn't matter because even before this latest idiocy the plan had been gutted down enough that a lot of that extra capacity wouldn't have appeared, and we instead have spent billions extra tunnelling under fields near rich people's homes so they wouldn't have to hear trains every now and then

I don’t care if the train takes 8 or 10 hours to go from one end of the country to the other what I care about is the fact that you are raped by the 200 plus charge.

goes to look

It looks like a rail ticket a week from now (October 10) is about £220 from London to Inverness. A bus ticket (megabus) can be had for £27. On the other hand, rail is about 8 hours and the bus 13 hours.

So if you would like to optimize for price, I suppose that the bus probably is a lot more appealing, though the trip will take longer.

EDIT: Just to check what you could theoretically get the bus time down to, Google Maps says that it's about 10 hours to go from London to Inverness in a car. So that's about the floor on what a bus service could do (no changes, no intermediate stops), short of introducing new or faster highways.

EDIT2: For completeness, air (easyJet) appears to be available for that route for £51 and take 1 hour and 40 minutes. More expensive than the bus, but also much less so than rail, and considerably faster than either.

California HSR did this technique and honestly it isn't going a whole ton better. Hopefully they connect Los Angeles and San Francisco with the central valley high speed line eventually, but it would have served a lot of people better to start in the cities and connect them through the valley later. Those lines in the cities could have been used for regional rail services while the valley line was completed. Specifically it would have been great to see a new SF to Sacramento line via San Jose and the LA to Lancaster line via Burbank.

To roughly paraphrase one famous, self-described softy southerner espousing a tale where they soon learned a very valuable lesson: "Manchester's in the north and so's Scotland. Shouldn't take that long to get from one to the other."

Nice chap. Robert Llewellyn. Does electric car stuff and the like now. Occasionally plays Kryten in Red Dwarf, but this isn't strictly relevant.

The point is that, by default, no-one from south of Watford understands that there's quite a lot of land and people here between London and Edinburgh (and quite a lot north of that as well for that matter).

And even if you manage to get over the geography (conceptually or literally), there's a lot more lefty* voters in this ignored bit, so it tends to suit the largely centrist and right-leaning south to maintain their ignorance. And distance.

* Although the leftyness often doesn't extend to "foreign" folk, which is a disappointment.

Hertfordshire

• Another Tory, presumably