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The purpose of it is to free up capacity on the existing network, unfortunately they choose to use speed as a selling point

Unfortunely passengers will have no choice but to switch to the new High Speed 2 line as those Avantie trains or whoever the next franchise Holder will run the service as those intercity service will switch to the new High Speed line off the West Coast Mainline.

​@@jayjay9610.. there are no "capacity issues" on the existing network. HS2 Ltd have been hoodwinking the public & the government since day one of this monstrous vanity project & all their lies & corruption have recently been exposed. Senior executives shredded documents & used misleading projections to ensure that billions of pounds kept flowing into the project. Whistleblowers claim they were told by bosses to lie about the project & were sacked after speaking out. They say the government wasn't informed of the real cost of HS2, all while voting on laws that approved Its construction. Take the WCML for instance .. arguments that it's "full to capacity" rely on a discredited, out of date forecasting model which overestimates long distance passenger growth & isn't used for anything anymore except to justify HS2. Network Rail's "New Lines Programme Capacity Analysis" shows that WCML capacity is kept artificially low by private operators wanting to maximise profits. A DfT analysis shows that in peak hours leaving Euston, WCML trains were loaded at just 52.2%.

@@scottpeacock5492actually it will only be the HS2 train sets that go into the new track, the current Avanti rolling stock will still use the old WCML south of hansacre😊

Yeah duh a white elephant cos can't see countryside innit

yada yada yada, people were roaring at Crossrail for being one too, yet its already pretty much paid for itself, nimbys only think about themselves and short term benefit

Exactly

up to Scotland 👏

Of course you’re called Barry with a dunce misunderstanding like this. Back in the corner with you

I will vote for anyone that promises that.

​@@DavidKnowles0.. Labour will win the general election & Sir Keir Starmer, in a January interview, stated categorically that he wouldn't revive the Northern leg, saying .. "it wasn't possible to do as the tory government had blown the budget & contracts are going to be cancelled" which is excellent news as HS2 is an environmental disaster of epic proportions & Britain's biggest infrastructure mistake in half a century.

An incredibly brief electric train swoosh? I think you're thinking of steam trains. Or even Deltics!

@@tomhoworth1685 few years back I went to a live demo which was set up by north Warwickshire council to demonstrate just how loud the train was going to be as it passes through the village of water Orton they used sound engineers with a big PA system and it was bloody loud a 140 decibels loud so I think your wrong pal and you can take your sarcasm stuff it in your pipe and smoke it 👍🏼have a lovely day although your probably the sort of person that’s always right yeah?

British Rail InterCity :D

Although, with motorways everywhere, mostly unscreened and with constant road 'hum' (I should know, I live half a mile from a raised dual carriageway!), does anyone really hate the very brief sound of an electric train swoosh? It won't even clack as there are no joints in the rails and few points to run over.

definitely, but better late than never :)

Agreed - there's too many pictures circulating of dug up fields without people understanding why.

That is almost certainly a construction access road. Built so that the heavy machinery can access the various parts of the project without getting stuck in mud. Once the construction is complete the road will be removed and the land returned to floodplain.

Terrible isn't it. All this progress and gantries and stuff

@@mrglide7078 I think we have different ideas of what constitutes progress. £80 billion could have improved transport infrastructure across the country. Instead some will save a few minutes on their unlikely journey between Curzon St. in Birmingham and Old Oak Common in Acton. The biggest winner will be Chiltern Railways who offer a service people actually want and can afford.

​@@Sandsrodrick'...save a few minutes...' Not sure you've grasped the full concept of this project, so best leave it there

You are believing everything that others have told you? The "Social connection of property" has been lost out of view, in that point you are right.

@@rppacademic What others are you referring to, ticket prices are a matter of fact not subjective opinion. For example an annual rail season ticket to travel from west London into central London (lets imagine I work in the city) that costs as of writing no less than £2920.00. To travel something like 16 miles each way five days a week. That is something like 7.2 weeks of take home wages for me. So the first 7 weeks of each earning year is worked just to pay to get into work. How much do you imagine HS2 is going to charge for an annual season ticket to travel into London city from points along its route? And what as this to do with what "others have told me"?

@@TheWarforged The Tories actually allow those ticket-prices. As long as trains are in private ownership they take what they can get. That was one of the the biggest mistakes. The rail was founded to take people from one village to another village and not to make some people with money even richer. In the US you can see that this mistake has made them fall far behind China, Japan, Spain and other parts of Europe. The politicians decide what prices are to be paid in the future.

@@rppacademic16 years of labour gov did not change the prices, seems a weak partisan argument to blame the ever blameable “tories”. And still nothing you said addresses the cost of hs2 vs its rewards for the public, indeed Covid and the lock down disproved the need for hs2 as a means of moving cheap labour from north of London into London as working from home proved far superior to expensive mega projects and offices. Yet governments on both sides of the house continued with hs2.

@@TheWarforged Tell it to the mayors and citizens in the midlands and the north.

“They”

It goes quickly and everything needs to be in place, that is the finishing work!?!

This is high speed 2 between London and Birmingham UK. The trains should be a lot faster than brightline in California when finished.

...and how wonderful it is that we can benefit from the pioneering work of the Spanish engineers, just as the rest of the world benefitted from our early railway engineering. It's very easy to talk down this project simply because others have done it before, but that's progress.

All construction work is built on the back of previous projects some alterations are made for the better, some are tried and failed, at least we know this works I have no problem with that, we are not pioneering because we took too long to build the bloody thing!?!

I've used the HS line between Madrid and Barcelona many times through work. Emma is a great example of importing the skills to deliver at speed our service-driven economy turned its back on since 2016 and decades of under-investment in training and infrastructure before. At least, with a change of government on July 4th, there's fresh hope of delivering the full capacity benefits of HS2 by building out to Leeds and Manchester, and tunneling into Euston.

Yes, we all hope after the HS2 also gets to Euston, that HS2 can be extended to Crewe, and then northern branches. Perhaps the UK also needs to start building the new GenIII+ and GenIV nuclear power plants to allow rail electrification of EWR, Transpennine (TRU), Eastern lines, and all of the UK British rail.

'firsts'??? Many of these techniques have been used in mainland Euro and China for decades ... and much faster and much lower costs! Considering our British pioneering heritage, this project would make the real pioneering' engineering greats, of this country, turn in their graves!

@@simonbaxter8001 Just go listen to the commentary again Simon. Many of these systems are new TO THE UK. At least pay attention before getting on your high horse. And park the faux patriotism as well. We never had every new technology or way of working. We invented much but not everything. As for turning in graves I would reckon Brunel would pretty pleased we are at last building new railways.

@@1chish nothing can stop me I’m all the way abt

Many people who criticise HS2 over costs fail to understand the project. Costs, timescales, benefits, raison d'etre' and the huge amount of waste injected by the politics. Then again, few have the imagination to comprehend what is involved in a construction which disappears over the horizon beyond their gaze in whichever direction one looks. Thankfully those blessed with vision are cracking on and showing what is possible. This line is going to be wonderful when complete with ALL the land restitution work done too. Give it a year in operation and they'll be saying why did the politician order a stop at Handsacre, just as was said when Eurostar used to join the classic Network East of Dollands Moor to trundle into Waterloo. The desperately sad thing is if it was covered in tarmac there'd probably be far less opposition to it.

​@@simonbaxter8001 Watch a video where they show the building of the Chinese high speed railway and compare it, luckily they won't be building any here, but it is cheap, it won't last 100 years though, ours will most probably last two hundred years, much like the Victorian one!?!

People can't afford rail travel because prices are high. Prices are high because demand is higher than supply. Demand is higher than supply because the rail network is full. The rail network is full because there's not enough space to run all the local, regional and national high-speed trains we need. Solution: build more tracks and stations, like HS2 is doing.

Evidence? Sure prices do rise over time, but so do wages, and in fact as a percentage of the average take home wage, a rail ticket is often less expensive now than it was back in the 1960's when I was growing up. So there is very little evidence to support this rather cynical view.

The new UK nuclear power plants (GenIII+ and GenIV) will allow electrification of all UK and at low _green_ energy cost. The HS2 is the future of high-speed rail in UK and hopefully the USA can take the good hints too.

@@jamesadfowkes Yes. The HS2 adds high-speed capacity which will then permit additional slow trains to run on the heritage rails lines. So HS2 adds high-speed travel alternate lines to the older heritage _slow_ lines...so then the old lines will get more travellers and freight transport.

@@jamesadfowkes Prices are high because of greedy overseas owners and shareholders milking the system for all they can. Why is UK rail five times more expensive, per mile, than mainland Europe?

6 years seems optimistic looking at the slow progress so far

Why 6 years ? The halfway point of building this viaduct has nothing to do with finishing HS2 in 6 years.

@@kevinpowell210 not optimistic. They are really doing this now and getting on with it.

@@kevinpowell210 Unfortunately the time taken is because the Government overspecified ground settlement and infrastructure life expectancy to a level not seen anywhere else in the world for high speed rail. The Engineers (HS2) had to meet this contractual requirement that meant embankments and cuttings have to be made then left for some time before finishing to the final profile. This was the main reason for the initial ballooning costs and delays after the initial route was decided, but since then the cost increases have been modest as well as in line with inflationary pressures.

A white elephant TORY TROPHY ‘we are good at infrastructure project regardless of actual need’ . This while we are drowning in shit trying to surf, eating shit and plastic due to poorly treated water while the greedy water companies pay out dividends and do the bare minimum, clearly certainly not doing the necessary grey / surface water separation which has been blatantly clear for years . 9 perhaps Severn Trent are the only half decent water company , maybe ? The only way like it or not is renationalisation. fines are pointless they just get paid by our rip off water bills ( We are one of the worst with sw water (Pennon group). Another Thatcher shibboleth chicken home to roost, like the blood transfusion scandal , the start of the Tory death by thousand cuts to the NHS . So “sir” Kier Starmer talks about renationalising railways , oh dear,….. low hanging fruit Kier, WATER IS AN ESSENTIAL and no one could deny the harm that years of under investment have done.