biting the dust

 

The long term aspirations of the crass Tory branding at their conference were bared for all to see. Cancelling a project started in 2009 ten years too late. But as J-RM says, all the new projects are 'front-loaded'. Of course they are. Spend as much as possible on the 'shovel ready' before anyone realises the project is going down.

Paper the plans with aspirational diagrams, like the one below.

It is all too much. I'm an ex-Waterloo commuter and have suffered thousands of delays of a half hour or more travelling the one hour journey to my then home in Hampshire. 

Let's see: 220 working days per year. One third of the time a delay on the homeward journey of maybe at least 20 minutes. Do the same for London to Birmingham and we can see that the 29 minutes saved slips away to negligible. Unless you're feeling lucky. 

Now glance at the originally guesstimated £37.5 billion cost. It's now estimated to cost a total of £107.6 billion, according to Oakervee Review. That's the low estimate by the way.

And opening the Stratford link to Birmingham trains would mean they could get right down to Dover. It's been fobbed off because of a purported need for ten extra platforms at Stratford. Stratford is already the 5th biggest station in the UK and has 17 platforms currently as well as considerable land around it, but was declared a non-runner by then transport secretary Justine Greening. 

Another example of the implementation of north south divide?

But let's follow the money. Spent already £22.4 billion on London to Birmingham. Magically found for 'The North' = £36 billion. Wait. That's the entire budget being spent again and the lumpy £22 billion swept under a bumpy carpet.

And its all about capacity too. Tube manages 2-3 minute intervals = 20trains per hour(mph). Fast trains are lower capacity. The Tokyo-Nagoya Bullet trains/Shinkansen manage 14 tph. And on our prestige lines like the Eurostar, we manage Ebbsfeet-Ashford at 8 tph.  

Another example of it always works in PowerPoint.