Article suggesting the eastern leg to Leeds has been shelved. https://www.examinerlive.co.uk/news...kCopy&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=sharebar
Great news as far as I am concerned...it brought nothing to South Yorkshire at all except destruction of homes, businesses and countryside.
Terrible news. This government has done some stupid stuff in the name of populism, but this - if true - is going to be up there as one of the most idiotic, as we'll no doubt conclude in twenty-odd years when the capacity will be needed more than ever.
On the one had, we *urgently need* faster, higher capacity rail links between the major cities at a cost cheaper than car or aeroplane. On the other hand, HS2 was a cack-handed way to achieve it that offered us (in South Yorkshire) no benefits. I think it would reduce the journey time to London by roughly 5 minutes.
Because it was meant to pass within so many metres of my house, in Ardsley, I was always on the HS2 mailing list with all the latest updates. But have had nothing for a couple of years now. Hopefully they are binning it and, as said above, putting the money to better use. Was also at Rabbit Ings for my son’s football, last week. That place was earmarked to have the train line carve straight through it, which would have been tragic!!
The sheet hit the fan in the sixties with the Beeching Report. All those lines that were closed would have made the ideal capacity we lack today. Extremely short sighted and corrupt.
The only way of increasing the frequency of existing services is getting as many fast trains as possible off desperately inefficient mixed routes, which is exactly what HS2 is designed to do. At a stroke you can cut pretty much all the fasts from the WCML, the ECML and the MML, giving the ability to run far more semi-fasts which can serve a lot more intermediate stations a lot more efficiently.
58 hectares of woodland are affected to build near enough 500 miles of railway. I really am sympathetic to those who care about the woodland, but HS2 aren't the main enemy here, and have done far more to minimise and mitigate the effect on forests than any road building project you care to name - the 15-mile Lower Thames Crossing, for comparison, has a negative effect on 54 hectares (see the article linked by Skryptic below for the source). Obviously it would be best if we didn't have to take down any woodland, or interfere with any wildlife habitats. But I'm of the firm opinion that the best way of helping the environment is by encouraging modal shift away from cars on a gigantic scale, and without new railway lines there's simply no way that this can be done!
There is a fundamental misunderstanding about HS2 that all the benefit is simply about journey time. HS2 is about capacity. Every time somebody says "scrap HS2 and invest in local services" I wince, because freeing up capacity is the single best way to improve local services. Though when MPs don't understand that I don't think it's fair to expect the man on the street to understand it either. The real shambles is the fact that this country can't stick to a budget.
The capacity issue is one of Hs2's red herrings....one of a multitude of lies this despicable company maintains as fact.
I think the recent pandemic and the clear evidence that business can function without people physically being there has shown that HS2 is a waste of time.
