This should be the gameplay in Civilization, instead of the thing where you train and archaeologist who goes to excavate magically known locations.
Excavation of tunnels and such should just come with a chance of finding artifacts, but it only materializes with the right culture tech unlocked (before some point, buried treasures were just scrapped or sold, not put into museums).
My little village is built on the site of some ancient Japanese village [0] and any construction that involves digging up dirt often also unearths some kind of archaeological find that stops all work for half a year while the archaeologists do their stuff, if they can even be bothered to come.
It’s happened often enough that it’s a wink and a nod that nothing was found. Foremen and anyone ‘in-charge’ will not be on site until any kind of digging is complete.
I recall comments about this last week on the BBC website where people made the points that:
1. Surely the long term plan is to not keep these relics in a gargantuan warehouse but instead to put them in a museum(s) — with free entry no less — so that the tax paying public can enjoy them.
2. Further, collections of relics that relate to the site of each station on the line could be displayed in each.
The tax paying public aren't going to pay for that.
The existing collections can just about barely justify free entry. Most museums have a vast secondary collection that's not on display already. These items are going in a warehouse because there isn't enough money to do archaeology on them any time soon, let alone prep them for display.
Second that, it's really good. You can only really see a small fraction of it still, just because of the nature of it (it's like a central viewing space completely surrounded by warehouse shelving) but really interesting, from the meta perspective of seeing how they store and tend to pieces too.
For example, there's a bunch of swords 'on display' (such as it is) and then you can sort of just about see an entire sword storage/curation room off to one side, with many times more than are actually visible in some detail.
Science Museum opens its warehouse in Swindon to the public too
Highly recommended for people with an interest in vehicles, but there's a lot of other stuff from twentieth century consumer goods to the contents of Stephen Hawkings office on shelves there and document archives too.
Out of 450 000 pieces I bet 440 000 pieces are just pottery shards and other ”boring” things. Important for history etc but no one wants to go to a museum with 400 000 almost identical pieces of pottery shards and similar. Only a tiny amount will be things the public wanna see in a museum.
So true. Folks used pots for tens of thousands of years, and used them mostly like disposable dinnerware. They broke, daily, and got tossed out the window. A settlement of a dozen roundhouses might have a million sherds, depending on how long it persisted.
1. The permanent collections of just about all museums in the UK are free so if they go to a museum they will be free to see (after an initial exhibition if they were to host that)
2. This is not uncommon for things like Roman ruins in the UK. For example, near the Tower of London, there is a glass window in a random pedestrian underpass where you can see part of the original Roman wall around London, or in Cirencester and St Albans there are big parks where you can see all the Roman ruins. Where relics are smaller or more valuable, something like a railway station isn't really set up to keep them secure and on display so they would sometimes show casts or photographs of items, and have the original in an actual dedicated exhibition in a museum. For example if you go to Orkney you can see some viking relics in situ (eg the "viking grafitti" runes on the stones in maes howe) and some (like the scar boat burial) you need to go to an actual museum to see.
Contrapoint to the naysayers: building infrastructure is good actually, and in this specific case, has had the added side benefit of unearthing these cool artifacts that would otherwise still be decaying in some peat bog.
British NIMBYs seem unusually strong, even in a world of NIMBYism. Best wishes to the British in defeating the Midsomer Historical Society of Bat-Loving Cranks, which apparently controls the deep state over there.
On behalf of the Midsomer Historical Society of Bat-Loving Cranks, i'd like to extend a cordial invitation to our Wickerman Festival this year. Perhaps on perusing our good works, you might be persuaded of their merits.
Sir, this is wimpy's - the confusion of naming cheap housing construction firm, the same as a very old burger chain in the UK which predates Wendy's or McDonald's in the UK by many decades being most apposite.
HS2 will be fantastic, transformative infrastructure… decades from now when (or if) it is actually completed.
The issue is that the project has been so badly mismanaged and costs have spiralled so far out of control that even the first small, incomplete section of it is now costing us 3X what the ENTIRE project was supposed to cost. It’s also at least 7 years behind schedule: when they started construction, stage 1 was supposed to open in 2026 - this year!!
Yes, NIMBYism is part of this, but catastrophic project management failure and a culture where contractors view the public purse as an limitless cash cow to be milked to the maximum extent possible have a lot to do with it too.
Bottom line is the UK is not good at building large infrastructure projects, and the bigger they are, the worse it gets. Complete rethink/reboot required.
Or, instead, keep building, so the UK actually gets experience with large scale projects? Establish an anti-corruption body that retrospectively investigates every pound spent on HS2, and places lifetime public-contract bans on contractors found to have acted dishonestly? If the graft is as extreme and obvious as you say, surely this is no hard task.
If the UK has no experience building things, there's only one way to get some, and it's not to stop building for ten years while the government 'rethinks and reboots' (i.e. pays McKinsey for expensive reports exculpating McKinsey for any cost overruns). Ten years during which all the people who were actually involved move on to other roles, often private sector, often overseas. That's how you throw away all the experience accrued during this construction.
Sometimes the perfect is the enemy of the good. In twenty years, when the HS2 is zipping around, bringing down the cost of logistics, making groceries cheaper, lowering house prices as people can live further out, no one will even remember how it was built.
You will never get better by simply saying lets stop it, cancel the project and 'rethink'. Your not going to find a route that is much better. Your not going to magically find much supplier for your trains and equipment.
Also the short section that they are working on is by far the most expensive per kilometer compared to the northern parts. So the cost was always going to be pre-loaded in the early part.
Its also the case that this 3x number is not correct when you adjust for inflation. Covid and other stuff has increased because of inflation specially in that sector.
Another issue in the UK rail industry is simply that building and investing is so incredibly inconsistent that there isn't the pipeline for training people. And the constant political battle about HS2 also makes companies hesitant to do the needed investments.
But bottom line is this, unless you simply continue to work on HS2 and other infrastructure projects (like desperately needed electrification) you simply will never get better at infrastructure. And there are many things to learn and to get better at, on every level from parliament down to individual construction worker.
Unfortunately so far the 'reflection' that the UK has done on the issue with HS2 have been extremely disappointing and they have learned very little. But still even so, just by doing it the people and organization have gotten better and are moving increasingly faster.
Not doing the next parts of HS2 is hilariously stupid as the larger benefits only happen once the whole thing is complete. The UK has spend likely 50-60% of the total cost and only gets about 20% of the benefits.
UK is so densely populated that something like this affects a LOT of people. Also people's "back yards" are tiny enough as it is. Small changes have a big impact and people living in such cramped spaces are living in constant fear of that.
If you happen to come across any part of HS2 in some random village you've never heard of it's quite incredible the impact it's having on the locals. Locals who live miles away from the nearest station and therefore unable to use the line, by the way.
We also have very little wildlife left and we don't really want to live in concrete jungles.
Suffice to say, it's not difficult to see why it's like this in the UK if you actually come and see.
>> If you happen to come across any part of HS2 in some random village you've never heard of it's quite incredible the impact it's having on the locals. Locals who live miles away from the nearest station and therefore unable to use the line, by the way.
Because people inherently misunderstand the benefit of HS2, and how could they not if it's constantly being misrepresented by our media and politicians.
UK has one of the highest proportion of freight transported by road in Europe. That is fundamentally because our rail infrastructure is overloaded and unable to take any more freight. All non-perishable stuff that in other countries just goes on rail, in the UK is moved by trucks on our roads. Which as you can imagine, is causing tens of billions of pounds worth of damage to our roads, which we - taxpayers - pay for. All of these locals that live miles away from the train station are already affected by the lack of rail infrastructure - because every time they drive somewhere they have to contend with massive potholes and insane amount of heavy cargo traffic anywhere they go. If HS2 is ever finished, it will reduce congestion and our roads and reduce the wear and tear which again, is costing us billions in upkeep every year.
But according to our media, it's all about saving london commuters 2 minutes on a train from Birmingham, so every Dick and Harry is against it, because like you said - they live miles from the nearest station, why would they care?
It's not even about freight! HS2 will increase passenger capacity. The existing trains are completely full at peak time and run at the maximum frequency. Building a whole new line will allow a lot more people to travel. The demand is clearly there despite the price, because it's also pretty congested to drive anywhere inside the M25.
If we wanted to address the freight situation it would be along the route of the A428/A14 from Folkstone (where much of the freight is landed) to the Midlands. That road already has a cheery sign on it pointing out how high the accident rate is.
A problem with this argument is that it actually doesn't help most people on the HS2 route. If you live in a village on the outskirts of Aylesbury say, it's not much good to you personally that there's more local services on the WCML, because it's a 40-50 minute drive to the nearest WCML station; your local line will see no improvement. Freeing up space on the M1 has no impact either for the same reason.
It would of perhaps been an easier sell if we could of built it much closer to the WCML and told people, look this is to get rid of those horrible fast trains that wizz though your local station at 125mph.We'll use the space for more services so your commute to London from say Leighton buzzard is faster and less busy.
Knocking down half the towns that the WCML runs through to build more tracks carrying trains that aren't going to stop there would be neither easier nor cheaper than HS2.
Do you think the people who designed HS2 have not considered these aspects?
You analysis is very narrow and only considered the benefits to a certain set of people.
HS2 actually follows reasonably closely to the old GCML. And for the same reason, its the best route to build a fast rail-line along.
I think your proposal complete ignores the additional cost of such a route change. And the cost alone, aside from anything else would make it unreasonable.
Many things go into selecting a route and in most cases where I think they made the wrong choice its usually because of cost concerns, like not building the needed tunnels into cities.
The reason HS2 route cost so much money is because so much is tunneled. Why is so much tunnelled? Because rich people live there and won't accept a blot on the landscape, partially because they don't see a personal benefit.
If you can remove the tunnels it doesn't really matter that the route is slightly longer or has slowly less optimal geometry.
The reason you can't run as many other trains on WCML and other lines is because high-speed non-stop trains take so much capacity. Once you remove them, you can run many more local/regional trains with more stops and higher frequency.
The whole way HS2 is designed is to maximally reduce the amount of fast trains going north south on the existing network. Leading to a massive capacity upgrade on the existing lines. You can still run some express lines but likely much more lines that stop at more station, making it fast for you to go to next HS2 stop and from there to the further distance destination.
HS2 connection to Leeds was designed to help the ECML, the whole HS2 system was designed by experts to help with WCML and ECML.
Of course now that the former car brained fucking moron of a prime minister in his last attempt to safe himself canceled most of HS2 all those benefits are gone. And labor is to cowardly and ignorant to bring it back.
Felixstowe, not Folkestone? The latter is where the channel tunnel is, which does account for a lot of freight but you probably meant the container port at Felixstowe. I used to drive on the A14 daily and you could tell when a ship had recently arrived by the number of containers on the roads. The road also suffered badly from "tram tracks" due to large numbers of heavy good vehicles. Crazy when you realise a lorry can take one container while a single train can take a hundred or more.
Yes, most people cannot think beyond first-order effects, but this can be equally applied to HS2 proponents. There are other solutions to cut the amount of cargo traffic, but most of them involve just consuming less stuff.
Building more and more infrastructure is not sustainable. It's been shown time and time again that more infrastructure only leads to more usage of said infrastructure. The number of lorries on the road will not decrease, we'll just start carting around even more stuff than before.
> because every time they drive somewhere they have to contend with massive potholes and insane amount of heavy cargo traffic anywhere they go
I don't buy that. The potholes are in residential and country roads. No amount of railways is going to do anything about that. The cargo traffic which could go via rail is on the motorways.
I'm all for more rail and less roads. But to stop the road usage we need to tax it more heavily, especially for heavier vehicles, and not just lorries. So far I haven't seen any evidence of replacing roads with rail, it's just more, more, more.
Isn't the problem that the requirements for line were "gold plated"? If they'd put in another standard rail line instead, it would have increased capacity, taken up much less space, would have been much cheaper, would have caused less disruption and would have had a clearer business case.
What's the good of a perfect railway line if it never gets built? What happened to the capacity argument? There is likely a good optimum between the cheapest and most expensive possible for capacity and speed. We could all fly around in supersonic aircraft, but there's a reason we don't.
It's getting built! Large sections of it are nearly finished!
Quite a lot of the cost is the NIMBY appeasement mentioned upthread. Something like a quarter of the line will be in tunnels. Making a slower line wouldn't make that any cheaper.
Connections to HS1/Europe, and to Leeds, Golborne, East Midlands, Manchester and finally even Crewe have all been cancelled so now extra expenditures will focus instead on Euston Station. That's not the large section people were interested in riding. Perhaps Old Oak Common should instead have been tunnelled the same distance through to Waterloo International (whose international platforms are now deleted).
The international platforms are not deleted! They were brought back into use from 2018-2019 to serve the Windsor Lines, which includes the service to Reading - platforms 20-24. That somewhat reduces the congestion at Waterloo; the station throat limits adding more services.
The extension to Euston was supposed to have 11 platforms. Even the reduced scope now being implemented is 6 platforms, I believe. All 11 were required to handle the eastern leg of HS2 [providing bypass capacity for the East Coast Main Line out of King's Cross and the Midland Main Line out of St Pancras], and services to Scotland and Manchester [bypassing the West Coast Main Line from Euston's classic platforms].
steam is great technology - it is still used in power plants today. The only reason diesel replaced it was labor cost which made up for the loss in fuel efficiency.
The high speed lets you build the Y shape to serve London to both north east and north west, as well as cross country journeys from Birmingham to the north east with the minimum amount of new track. With more standard rail lines you'd need to build a lot more. Plus there's many other benefits to high speed.
If you’re building a new rail line you might as well make it high speed. The problem is that a political decision was made to tunnel through the Cotswolds to minimise local impact because a lot of rich and influential people live there.
No this is just a typical media nonsense that is spread by idiots who don't know anything.
> If they'd put in another standard rail line instead
That would be crazy. In order to be a viable line to go from Midlands to London and reduce capacity, it would have to be at the very, very minimum as fast as that line goes today. So you are going to build a high-speed line of some sort anyway.
And that means maybe you can be a bit more adaptive to the terrain, but that also leads to more distance and thus more kilometers of line that has to be build.
A huge amount of the cost is simply buying the land, building the tunnels and bridges, putting up the electricity wires and so on. All that you would have to do anyway.
So basically at the very minimum you would need to build a 200km/h line, and nobody serious would even consider that. A 250km/h is the only reasonable 'lets safe money choice'. Going to a 300-350km/h line is going to be more expensive, but likely only by a few %, maybe 10%. But you would lose a huge amount of the benefit, as tons of study show time is a massive important to use.
So if you actually take into account future income from the line, building it to a lower standard would have been insanely stupid.
> taken up much less space
This is just straight up factually wrong. If you want to save money by changing alignment, you need more space, not less.
> would have been much cheaper
As I pointed out, much is simply wrong here.
> would have caused less disruption
Building would have more disruption and overall there would be more disruption in general.
> would have had a clearer business case
The business case, would be much much worse.
The people making that argument somehow think that you could build some rural 160km/h rail line and still get 90% of the benefit. Yet somehow no country who analysis this beliefs this and pretty much every single rail expert in the world doesn't agree with it either.
So the question you have to ask yourself do you want to believe the designer of HS2, most experts in rail technology or a bunch of anti-infrastructure activists?
What nonsense. As if there was a desperate need for land in rural Britain. Southern England is densely populated compared to countries, but its still incredibly rural.
In most places it barley effects people at all and when it does 99% of the time its a minimal visual impact.
> therefore unable to use the line, by the way.
This is a complete misunderstanding on the system effects of these lines. The point is that all other train lines can be used much more efficiently because the high-speed trains don't have to use those lines anymore. Making it much easier to run more rural trains.
And it will also reduce car use on these routes, meaning the much, much worse highways will be used less.
So in actual fact, the new lines are massively positive in terms of overall impact for rural areas.
And I say this living in a country with some of the most dense rail networks in the world.
> We also have very little wildlife left and we don't really want to live in concrete jungles.
Another bunch of nonsense. Rail lines are very small and highly efficient. If you didn't build rail lines, you would almost certainty have to extend highways and those are infinity worse for wildlife.
Railways and specially high-speed rail have the best impact vs effect calculation of almost anything you can build.
"People like you" shows that you're no better than the "NIMBYs" you so hate. Just complete refusal to accept that anyone might be different from you or have problems that aren't yours.
It was never about "building infrastructure", though, which is why they used Compulsory Purchase to force farmers to sell their land for pennies. Because obviously "undeveloped" land without any sort of planning consent is worth very little.
Now those bits of land, which have been put through the planning system and can now be built on, are not being used for HS2. So, they're being sold back to the farmers, right?
No, they're being sold for thousands of times the purchase price to property developers run by the people who donate the most to the government.
It's a land grab, same as the "inheritance tax on farms" thing.
The over 60s in the UK are probably the most privileged demographic in the history of the nation.
Just last October the government reduced tax free savings allowances on the Cash ISA for everyone...except he over 60s.
The over 60s have iron-clad "triple locked" state pensions that are _guaranteed_ to grow unsustainably (faster than tax revenue) at the cost of the working tax payer.
We need infrastructure and productivity growth, so the over 60s can take their gold plated compulsory buyouts and go do one.
Yes, because a demolished house is a brownfield site which automatically has outline planning consent and you can build just about anything you like on it. It's worth a fortune.
A farmer's field without planning consent is bought from the farmer priced as a worthless patch of mud, but taxed as though it already had a couple of dozen £500k rabbit hutch houses built on it.
> A farmer's field without planning consent is bought from the farmer priced as a worthless patch of mud, but taxed as though it already had a couple of dozen £500k rabbit hutch houses built on it.
Farm land isn't taxed - it's exempt from business rates
>>though, which is why they used Compulsory Purchase to force farmers to sell their land for pennies. Because obviously "undeveloped" land without any sort of planning consent is worth very little.
Did you ever look into any of it? Because it's 100000% nonsense. One of the reasons why HS2 is over budget so much is because farmers are being paid absolutely through the nose for smallest chunks of land taken for it. Compulsory purchase has to pay the market rate, and in most cases it pays well above that.
>>No, they're being sold for thousands of times the purchase price to property developers run by the people who donate the most to the government.
I'd love to see an example of any piece of land being sold for "thousands of times the purchase price", it would be quite incredible. And the land goes back to auction, anyone can bid on it so not sure how exactly is it sold to "people who donate the most" - care to explain? Or better yet, give an example?
>>It's a land grab, same as the "inheritance tax on farms" thing.
Yes, nothing to do with people like the Percy family owning half of Northumerland for the last 700 years and never paying any inheritance tax on it because they farm on some of it. Nuh huh.
I want to print this article and take it with me when asking permission to use my pro-grade Garrett metal detector on unused, abandoned but owned / to be redeveloped property.
I’m old enough and studied enough to know where I live people in the Great Depression stashed loot in jars and buried it. Who knows what all could be in the occasional backyard recovery. History tells lots of things, not many listen. Utility can be limited in scope.
Get any satellite imagery of the UK, like on Google Earth. Even at a very zoomed out level, with London and Birmingham but an inch apart, you'll instantly spot the bit of HS2 they're building.
To this point; if you look at google maps satellite view and zoom in/out repeatedly over the UK the yellow line 'road' that doesn't disappear and reload is the construction site of HS2.
If you want confirmation, the easiest bits to "check" are Aylesbury and Coventry. London and Birmingham are too big for the features to stand out.
To be clear, it is currently really easy to find because major earthworks are being done, and that requires space to move in the equipment to do it, along with new roads to get to points that were previously inaccessible, being the middle of nowhere.
To see what it will look like afterwards, try to find High Speed 1, aka the Channel Tunnel Rail Link, now that it's had nearly 20 years to be landscaped and vegetation to grow back. If you don't know what you're looking for, you won't see it.
Arguably the science museum London already had one. They lost a bit of donated science bits over many years due to lack of maintenance and records management.
Yet another demonstration of the fact that much of archeology is a result of adding a scientific veneer to simple treasure-hunting. 'Artifacts', 'culture' and 'history' notwithstanding. Once 'discovered' and shaken down, many 'sites' have been roughly 'repaired' for the benefit of tourists.
In modern times a hand axe is opposed to full axes, hatchets, felling axes, wood splitting axes etc. Depending on where you are in the world you will have different axe categories, but a 'hand axe' is typically present as an axe wielded in a single hand.
However, some significant distinction should be made for what is actually meant here. For such historic finds "hand axe" often means a stone tool with two faces and shaped like a tear drop / round-bottomed triangle. With the 'bottom' face shaped to a crude blade, and the 'top' 'sides' made into a grip. Note there is no shaft, and the way it is used is speculative and likely very varied, as few other tools existed.
This should be the gameplay in Civilization, instead of the thing where you train and archaeologist who goes to excavate magically known locations.
Excavation of tunnels and such should just come with a chance of finding artifacts, but it only materializes with the right culture tech unlocked (before some point, buried treasures were just scrapped or sold, not put into museums).
My little village is built on the site of some ancient Japanese village [0] and any construction that involves digging up dirt often also unearths some kind of archaeological find that stops all work for half a year while the archaeologists do their stuff, if they can even be bothered to come.
It’s happened often enough that it’s a wink and a nod that nothing was found. Foremen and anyone ‘in-charge’ will not be on site until any kind of digging is complete.
[0]: https://kanko-omachi.gr.jp/spot/wappara/
I recall comments about this last week on the BBC website where people made the points that:
1. Surely the long term plan is to not keep these relics in a gargantuan warehouse but instead to put them in a museum(s) — with free entry no less — so that the tax paying public can enjoy them.
2. Further, collections of relics that relate to the site of each station on the line could be displayed in each.
> museum(s) — with free entry no less
The tax paying public aren't going to pay for that.
The existing collections can just about barely justify free entry. Most museums have a vast secondary collection that's not on display already. These items are going in a warehouse because there isn't enough money to do archaeology on them any time soon, let alone prep them for display.
Or do what the V&A has done in Docklands - make its warehouse available for the public to visit. Pretty cool day out.
https://www.vam.ac.uk/east/storehouse/visit
Second that, it's really good. You can only really see a small fraction of it still, just because of the nature of it (it's like a central viewing space completely surrounded by warehouse shelving) but really interesting, from the meta perspective of seeing how they store and tend to pieces too.
For example, there's a bunch of swords 'on display' (such as it is) and then you can sort of just about see an entire sword storage/curation room off to one side, with many times more than are actually visible in some detail.
Science Museum opens its warehouse in Swindon to the public too
Highly recommended for people with an interest in vehicles, but there's a lot of other stuff from twentieth century consumer goods to the contents of Stephen Hawkings office on shelves there and document archives too.
London already has free museums and galleries fyi
London has loads of exceptional museums that are completely free. If you ever have the chance to visit the city, do try to take advantage!
Entry to the main/permanent collections is free, but there are usually one or more special exhibitions at each museum that are paid entry.
Sadly we’re in the era where everything has a price but nothing is valued.
Out of 450 000 pieces I bet 440 000 pieces are just pottery shards and other ”boring” things. Important for history etc but no one wants to go to a museum with 400 000 almost identical pieces of pottery shards and similar. Only a tiny amount will be things the public wanna see in a museum.
> Out of 450 000 pieces I bet 440 000 pieces are just pottery shards and other ”boring” things
That's certainly super optimistic of you.
Yeah, it's probably more like 449,000 are pottery/ceramics.
Be kinda cool if they made wall mosaics at the respective stations out of them or something.
So true. Folks used pots for tens of thousands of years, and used them mostly like disposable dinnerware. They broke, daily, and got tossed out the window. A settlement of a dozen roundhouses might have a million sherds, depending on how long it persisted.
Probably that's what will happen.
1. The permanent collections of just about all museums in the UK are free so if they go to a museum they will be free to see (after an initial exhibition if they were to host that)
2. This is not uncommon for things like Roman ruins in the UK. For example, near the Tower of London, there is a glass window in a random pedestrian underpass where you can see part of the original Roman wall around London, or in Cirencester and St Albans there are big parks where you can see all the Roman ruins. Where relics are smaller or more valuable, something like a railway station isn't really set up to keep them secure and on display so they would sometimes show casts or photographs of items, and have the original in an actual dedicated exhibition in a museum. For example if you go to Orkney you can see some viking relics in situ (eg the "viking grafitti" runes on the stones in maes howe) and some (like the scar boat burial) you need to go to an actual museum to see.
Contrapoint to the naysayers: building infrastructure is good actually, and in this specific case, has had the added side benefit of unearthing these cool artifacts that would otherwise still be decaying in some peat bog.
British NIMBYs seem unusually strong, even in a world of NIMBYism. Best wishes to the British in defeating the Midsomer Historical Society of Bat-Loving Cranks, which apparently controls the deep state over there.
On behalf of the Midsomer Historical Society of Bat-Loving Cranks, i'd like to extend a cordial invitation to our Wickerman Festival this year. Perhaps on perusing our good works, you might be persuaded of their merits.
Kind regards,
Nigel.
Sir, this is wimpy's - the confusion of naming cheap housing construction firm, the same as a very old burger chain in the UK which predates Wendy's or McDonald's in the UK by many decades being most apposite.
HS2 will be fantastic, transformative infrastructure… decades from now when (or if) it is actually completed.
The issue is that the project has been so badly mismanaged and costs have spiralled so far out of control that even the first small, incomplete section of it is now costing us 3X what the ENTIRE project was supposed to cost. It’s also at least 7 years behind schedule: when they started construction, stage 1 was supposed to open in 2026 - this year!!
Yes, NIMBYism is part of this, but catastrophic project management failure and a culture where contractors view the public purse as an limitless cash cow to be milked to the maximum extent possible have a lot to do with it too.
Bottom line is the UK is not good at building large infrastructure projects, and the bigger they are, the worse it gets. Complete rethink/reboot required.
> Complete rethink/reboot required.
Or, instead, keep building, so the UK actually gets experience with large scale projects? Establish an anti-corruption body that retrospectively investigates every pound spent on HS2, and places lifetime public-contract bans on contractors found to have acted dishonestly? If the graft is as extreme and obvious as you say, surely this is no hard task.
If the UK has no experience building things, there's only one way to get some, and it's not to stop building for ten years while the government 'rethinks and reboots' (i.e. pays McKinsey for expensive reports exculpating McKinsey for any cost overruns). Ten years during which all the people who were actually involved move on to other roles, often private sector, often overseas. That's how you throw away all the experience accrued during this construction.
Sometimes the perfect is the enemy of the good. In twenty years, when the HS2 is zipping around, bringing down the cost of logistics, making groceries cheaper, lowering house prices as people can live further out, no one will even remember how it was built.
You will never get better by simply saying lets stop it, cancel the project and 'rethink'. Your not going to find a route that is much better. Your not going to magically find much supplier for your trains and equipment.
Also the short section that they are working on is by far the most expensive per kilometer compared to the northern parts. So the cost was always going to be pre-loaded in the early part.
Its also the case that this 3x number is not correct when you adjust for inflation. Covid and other stuff has increased because of inflation specially in that sector.
Another issue in the UK rail industry is simply that building and investing is so incredibly inconsistent that there isn't the pipeline for training people. And the constant political battle about HS2 also makes companies hesitant to do the needed investments.
But bottom line is this, unless you simply continue to work on HS2 and other infrastructure projects (like desperately needed electrification) you simply will never get better at infrastructure. And there are many things to learn and to get better at, on every level from parliament down to individual construction worker.
Unfortunately so far the 'reflection' that the UK has done on the issue with HS2 have been extremely disappointing and they have learned very little. But still even so, just by doing it the people and organization have gotten better and are moving increasingly faster.
Not doing the next parts of HS2 is hilariously stupid as the larger benefits only happen once the whole thing is complete. The UK has spend likely 50-60% of the total cost and only gets about 20% of the benefits.
UK is so densely populated that something like this affects a LOT of people. Also people's "back yards" are tiny enough as it is. Small changes have a big impact and people living in such cramped spaces are living in constant fear of that.
If you happen to come across any part of HS2 in some random village you've never heard of it's quite incredible the impact it's having on the locals. Locals who live miles away from the nearest station and therefore unable to use the line, by the way.
We also have very little wildlife left and we don't really want to live in concrete jungles.
Suffice to say, it's not difficult to see why it's like this in the UK if you actually come and see.
>> If you happen to come across any part of HS2 in some random village you've never heard of it's quite incredible the impact it's having on the locals. Locals who live miles away from the nearest station and therefore unable to use the line, by the way.
Because people inherently misunderstand the benefit of HS2, and how could they not if it's constantly being misrepresented by our media and politicians.
UK has one of the highest proportion of freight transported by road in Europe. That is fundamentally because our rail infrastructure is overloaded and unable to take any more freight. All non-perishable stuff that in other countries just goes on rail, in the UK is moved by trucks on our roads. Which as you can imagine, is causing tens of billions of pounds worth of damage to our roads, which we - taxpayers - pay for. All of these locals that live miles away from the train station are already affected by the lack of rail infrastructure - because every time they drive somewhere they have to contend with massive potholes and insane amount of heavy cargo traffic anywhere they go. If HS2 is ever finished, it will reduce congestion and our roads and reduce the wear and tear which again, is costing us billions in upkeep every year.
But according to our media, it's all about saving london commuters 2 minutes on a train from Birmingham, so every Dick and Harry is against it, because like you said - they live miles from the nearest station, why would they care?
It's not even about freight! HS2 will increase passenger capacity. The existing trains are completely full at peak time and run at the maximum frequency. Building a whole new line will allow a lot more people to travel. The demand is clearly there despite the price, because it's also pretty congested to drive anywhere inside the M25.
If we wanted to address the freight situation it would be along the route of the A428/A14 from Folkstone (where much of the freight is landed) to the Midlands. That road already has a cheery sign on it pointing out how high the accident rate is.
A problem with this argument is that it actually doesn't help most people on the HS2 route. If you live in a village on the outskirts of Aylesbury say, it's not much good to you personally that there's more local services on the WCML, because it's a 40-50 minute drive to the nearest WCML station; your local line will see no improvement. Freeing up space on the M1 has no impact either for the same reason.
It would of perhaps been an easier sell if we could of built it much closer to the WCML and told people, look this is to get rid of those horrible fast trains that wizz though your local station at 125mph.We'll use the space for more services so your commute to London from say Leighton buzzard is faster and less busy.
> if we could of built it much closer to the WCML
Knocking down half the towns that the WCML runs through to build more tracks carrying trains that aren't going to stop there would be neither easier nor cheaper than HS2.
There is a huge amount of countryside between the WCML and the current HS2 route. I'm not saying it should be literally parallel.
Do you think the people who designed HS2 have not considered these aspects?
You analysis is very narrow and only considered the benefits to a certain set of people.
HS2 actually follows reasonably closely to the old GCML. And for the same reason, its the best route to build a fast rail-line along.
I think your proposal complete ignores the additional cost of such a route change. And the cost alone, aside from anything else would make it unreasonable.
Many things go into selecting a route and in most cases where I think they made the wrong choice its usually because of cost concerns, like not building the needed tunnels into cities.
I actually don't think that's true.
The reason HS2 route cost so much money is because so much is tunneled. Why is so much tunnelled? Because rich people live there and won't accept a blot on the landscape, partially because they don't see a personal benefit.
If you can remove the tunnels it doesn't really matter that the route is slightly longer or has slowly less optimal geometry.
The reason you can't run as many other trains on WCML and other lines is because high-speed non-stop trains take so much capacity. Once you remove them, you can run many more local/regional trains with more stops and higher frequency.
The whole way HS2 is designed is to maximally reduce the amount of fast trains going north south on the existing network. Leading to a massive capacity upgrade on the existing lines. You can still run some express lines but likely much more lines that stop at more station, making it fast for you to go to next HS2 stop and from there to the further distance destination.
HS2 connection to Leeds was designed to help the ECML, the whole HS2 system was designed by experts to help with WCML and ECML.
Of course now that the former car brained fucking moron of a prime minister in his last attempt to safe himself canceled most of HS2 all those benefits are gone. And labor is to cowardly and ignorant to bring it back.
Felixstowe, not Folkestone? The latter is where the channel tunnel is, which does account for a lot of freight but you probably meant the container port at Felixstowe. I used to drive on the A14 daily and you could tell when a ship had recently arrived by the number of containers on the roads. The road also suffered badly from "tram tracks" due to large numbers of heavy good vehicles. Crazy when you realise a lorry can take one container while a single train can take a hundred or more.
Yes, most people cannot think beyond first-order effects, but this can be equally applied to HS2 proponents. There are other solutions to cut the amount of cargo traffic, but most of them involve just consuming less stuff.
Building more and more infrastructure is not sustainable. It's been shown time and time again that more infrastructure only leads to more usage of said infrastructure. The number of lorries on the road will not decrease, we'll just start carting around even more stuff than before.
> because every time they drive somewhere they have to contend with massive potholes and insane amount of heavy cargo traffic anywhere they go
I don't buy that. The potholes are in residential and country roads. No amount of railways is going to do anything about that. The cargo traffic which could go via rail is on the motorways.
I'm all for more rail and less roads. But to stop the road usage we need to tax it more heavily, especially for heavier vehicles, and not just lorries. So far I haven't seen any evidence of replacing roads with rail, it's just more, more, more.
Isn't the problem that the requirements for line were "gold plated"? If they'd put in another standard rail line instead, it would have increased capacity, taken up much less space, would have been much cheaper, would have caused less disruption and would have had a clearer business case.
Japan built the first Shinkansen while British Rail was still running steam services. Can't stay on the Victorian era rail constraints forever.
(it's very British to say "this is too good, can we have something cheap and nasty instead please?")
What's the good of a perfect railway line if it never gets built? What happened to the capacity argument? There is likely a good optimum between the cheapest and most expensive possible for capacity and speed. We could all fly around in supersonic aircraft, but there's a reason we don't.
It's getting built! Large sections of it are nearly finished!
Quite a lot of the cost is the NIMBY appeasement mentioned upthread. Something like a quarter of the line will be in tunnels. Making a slower line wouldn't make that any cheaper.
Connections to HS1/Europe, and to Leeds, Golborne, East Midlands, Manchester and finally even Crewe have all been cancelled so now extra expenditures will focus instead on Euston Station. That's not the large section people were interested in riding. Perhaps Old Oak Common should instead have been tunnelled the same distance through to Waterloo International (whose international platforms are now deleted).
The international platforms are not deleted! They were brought back into use from 2018-2019 to serve the Windsor Lines, which includes the service to Reading - platforms 20-24. That somewhat reduces the congestion at Waterloo; the station throat limits adding more services.
The extension to Euston was supposed to have 11 platforms. Even the reduced scope now being implemented is 6 platforms, I believe. All 11 were required to handle the eastern leg of HS2 [providing bypass capacity for the East Coast Main Line out of King's Cross and the Midland Main Line out of St Pancras], and services to Scotland and Manchester [bypassing the West Coast Main Line from Euston's classic platforms].
steam is great technology - it is still used in power plants today. The only reason diesel replaced it was labor cost which made up for the loss in fuel efficiency.
The high speed lets you build the Y shape to serve London to both north east and north west, as well as cross country journeys from Birmingham to the north east with the minimum amount of new track. With more standard rail lines you'd need to build a lot more. Plus there's many other benefits to high speed.
If you’re building a new rail line you might as well make it high speed. The problem is that a political decision was made to tunnel through the Cotswolds to minimise local impact because a lot of rich and influential people live there.
It would have been cheaper if we hadn't done so much tunnelling.
No this is just a typical media nonsense that is spread by idiots who don't know anything.
> If they'd put in another standard rail line instead
That would be crazy. In order to be a viable line to go from Midlands to London and reduce capacity, it would have to be at the very, very minimum as fast as that line goes today. So you are going to build a high-speed line of some sort anyway.
And that means maybe you can be a bit more adaptive to the terrain, but that also leads to more distance and thus more kilometers of line that has to be build.
A huge amount of the cost is simply buying the land, building the tunnels and bridges, putting up the electricity wires and so on. All that you would have to do anyway.
So basically at the very minimum you would need to build a 200km/h line, and nobody serious would even consider that. A 250km/h is the only reasonable 'lets safe money choice'. Going to a 300-350km/h line is going to be more expensive, but likely only by a few %, maybe 10%. But you would lose a huge amount of the benefit, as tons of study show time is a massive important to use.
So if you actually take into account future income from the line, building it to a lower standard would have been insanely stupid.
> taken up much less space
This is just straight up factually wrong. If you want to save money by changing alignment, you need more space, not less.
> would have been much cheaper
As I pointed out, much is simply wrong here.
> would have caused less disruption
Building would have more disruption and overall there would be more disruption in general.
> would have had a clearer business case
The business case, would be much much worse.
The people making that argument somehow think that you could build some rural 160km/h rail line and still get 90% of the benefit. Yet somehow no country who analysis this beliefs this and pretty much every single rail expert in the world doesn't agree with it either.
So the question you have to ask yourself do you want to believe the designer of HS2, most experts in rail technology or a bunch of anti-infrastructure activists?
Even in the South East, the UK isn’t that densely populated — apparently golf courses take up more space than housing (excluding roads)
HS2 benefits pretty my everyone along it’s route path through increases local services as capacity is released from the current lines
Midland Connect have a good overview of what it enables them to do – https://www.midlandsconnect.uk/media/1602/hs2-released-capac...
There’s also a document somewhere that covers how HS2 increases short distance services from Euston somewhere
Local rail transport should benefit hugely from HS2
What nonsense. As if there was a desperate need for land in rural Britain. Southern England is densely populated compared to countries, but its still incredibly rural.
In most places it barley effects people at all and when it does 99% of the time its a minimal visual impact.
> therefore unable to use the line, by the way.
This is a complete misunderstanding on the system effects of these lines. The point is that all other train lines can be used much more efficiently because the high-speed trains don't have to use those lines anymore. Making it much easier to run more rural trains.
And it will also reduce car use on these routes, meaning the much, much worse highways will be used less.
So in actual fact, the new lines are massively positive in terms of overall impact for rural areas.
And I say this living in a country with some of the most dense rail networks in the world.
> We also have very little wildlife left and we don't really want to live in concrete jungles.
Another bunch of nonsense. Rail lines are very small and highly efficient. If you didn't build rail lines, you would almost certainty have to extend highways and those are infinity worse for wildlife.
Railways and specially high-speed rail have the best impact vs effect calculation of almost anything you can build.
The taller the concrete jungle, the more spare land there is for people like you outside of it.
I don't live outside it.
"People like you" shows that you're no better than the "NIMBYs" you so hate. Just complete refusal to accept that anyone might be different from you or have problems that aren't yours.
HS2 is more sprawl than tall.
It’s called the RSPB
> building infrastructure is good actually
It was never about "building infrastructure", though, which is why they used Compulsory Purchase to force farmers to sell their land for pennies. Because obviously "undeveloped" land without any sort of planning consent is worth very little.
Now those bits of land, which have been put through the planning system and can now be built on, are not being used for HS2. So, they're being sold back to the farmers, right?
No, they're being sold for thousands of times the purchase price to property developers run by the people who donate the most to the government.
It's a land grab, same as the "inheritance tax on farms" thing.
Do you know how Compulsory Purchase Orders work?
Many people along the HS2 route have been paid double the market price of their house
Doesn’t matter what the price is if you lose your community.
Very narrow minded view that doesn’t take into account people over 60
Everything in UK politics takes into account people over 60. What we need is some policies taking into account people under 60.
The over 60s in the UK are probably the most privileged demographic in the history of the nation.
Just last October the government reduced tax free savings allowances on the Cash ISA for everyone...except he over 60s.
The over 60s have iron-clad "triple locked" state pensions that are _guaranteed_ to grow unsustainably (faster than tax revenue) at the cost of the working tax payer.
We need infrastructure and productivity growth, so the over 60s can take their gold plated compulsory buyouts and go do one.
As someone who is in their 50s I'd disagree with you
Very few people are losing their communities due to HS2
Yes, because a demolished house is a brownfield site which automatically has outline planning consent and you can build just about anything you like on it. It's worth a fortune.
A farmer's field without planning consent is bought from the farmer priced as a worthless patch of mud, but taxed as though it already had a couple of dozen £500k rabbit hutch houses built on it.
> A farmer's field without planning consent is bought from the farmer priced as a worthless patch of mud, but taxed as though it already had a couple of dozen £500k rabbit hutch houses built on it.
Farm land isn't taxed - it's exempt from business rates
>>though, which is why they used Compulsory Purchase to force farmers to sell their land for pennies. Because obviously "undeveloped" land without any sort of planning consent is worth very little.
Did you ever look into any of it? Because it's 100000% nonsense. One of the reasons why HS2 is over budget so much is because farmers are being paid absolutely through the nose for smallest chunks of land taken for it. Compulsory purchase has to pay the market rate, and in most cases it pays well above that.
>>No, they're being sold for thousands of times the purchase price to property developers run by the people who donate the most to the government.
I'd love to see an example of any piece of land being sold for "thousands of times the purchase price", it would be quite incredible. And the land goes back to auction, anyone can bid on it so not sure how exactly is it sold to "people who donate the most" - care to explain? Or better yet, give an example?
>>It's a land grab, same as the "inheritance tax on farms" thing.
Yes, nothing to do with people like the Percy family owning half of Northumerland for the last 700 years and never paying any inheritance tax on it because they farm on some of it. Nuh huh.
You really need a better source of information.
I want to print this article and take it with me when asking permission to use my pro-grade Garrett metal detector on unused, abandoned but owned / to be redeveloped property.
I’m old enough and studied enough to know where I live people in the Great Depression stashed loot in jars and buried it. Who knows what all could be in the occasional backyard recovery. History tells lots of things, not many listen. Utility can be limited in scope.
What is the HS2 route these days? Difficult for a casual to keep track?
Get any satellite imagery of the UK, like on Google Earth. Even at a very zoomed out level, with London and Birmingham but an inch apart, you'll instantly spot the bit of HS2 they're building.
To this point; if you look at google maps satellite view and zoom in/out repeatedly over the UK the yellow line 'road' that doesn't disappear and reload is the construction site of HS2.
If you want confirmation, the easiest bits to "check" are Aylesbury and Coventry. London and Birmingham are too big for the features to stand out.
Here is the official HS2 map: https://www.hs2.org.uk/map/?mapView=9_52.0744_-1.8347
Wow, it really is easy to find. It reminds you of the scale of this project.
To be clear, it is currently really easy to find because major earthworks are being done, and that requires space to move in the equipment to do it, along with new roads to get to points that were previously inaccessible, being the middle of nowhere.
To see what it will look like afterwards, try to find High Speed 1, aka the Channel Tunnel Rail Link, now that it's had nearly 20 years to be landscaped and vegetation to grow back. If you don't know what you're looking for, you won't see it.
the indiana jones warehouse.
Arguably the science museum London already had one. They lost a bit of donated science bits over many years due to lack of maintenance and records management.
TOP men…
Yet another demonstration of the fact that much of archeology is a result of adding a scientific veneer to simple treasure-hunting. 'Artifacts', 'culture' and 'history' notwithstanding. Once 'discovered' and shaken down, many 'sites' have been roughly 'repaired' for the benefit of tourists.
> a hand axe that may be more than 40,000 years old
As opposed to a foot axe I assume
> and 19th Century gold dentures
Ah, them classy 19th Centurians!
In modern times a hand axe is opposed to full axes, hatchets, felling axes, wood splitting axes etc. Depending on where you are in the world you will have different axe categories, but a 'hand axe' is typically present as an axe wielded in a single hand.
However, some significant distinction should be made for what is actually meant here. For such historic finds "hand axe" often means a stone tool with two faces and shaped like a tear drop / round-bottomed triangle. With the 'bottom' face shaped to a crude blade, and the 'top' 'sides' made into a grip. Note there is no shaft, and the way it is used is speculative and likely very varied, as few other tools existed.
The proto-axe if you will.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hand_axe
Those have always looked so unwieldy to me. What an excellent way to lose a limb.
FTA
> Hand axes were held in the palm rather than attached to a wooden handle.
I'm sorry your attempt at humor was completely missed by several pedants.
It’s a hand axe, Mark, not a felling axe.