This Forum will close on Wednesday 27 March, 2024. Please refer to the announcement on the Discussions page for further detail.
Nothing at all at all to do with gardening.
B3
Posts: 27,505
HS2 is costing billions so that people in Birmingham can get to London 20 minutes quicker.
Why not buy everyone in Birmingham an alarm clock so that they can leave home earlier?
In fact, they could buy everyone who lives north of Watford an alarm clock and still be quids in.
In London. Keen but lazy.
0
Posts
Ah but it also means you can get away from London quicker
“It's still magic even if you know how it's done.”
We can have clocks too. There'll still be plenty of money left.
High speed trains have made a huge difference to accessibility between cities here on the continent - Belgium, The Netherlands, France, Germany are the ones I've used and it certainly beats short hop air travel.
The UK desperately needs some upgrades to its train systems but I do wonder if money wouldn't be better spent on improving the lines it has as well as the rolling stock and stations so you can get more passengers thru in comfort and safety. I can remember having to stand all the way from Euston to Manchester for weeks on end in the early 80s. Things have not improved.
It would surely be cheaper in the long run to change bridges to cope with double decker trains and lengthen platforms on the busiest commuter lines and upgrade tracks to take faster trains on long distances between big cities without digging up whole swathes of countryside and urban areas for completely new lines.
Or just doing the work!
B3 I do like your alternative solution.
'You must have some bread with it me duck!'
We could do for alarm clocks what Switzerland did for cuckoo clocks.
Just another excuse for £billions to be spent helping London.
Generations of Londoncentric governments can't see beyond London.
£Billions spent on M25 widening, £billions of Heathrow, £billions on Cross rail, £billions on extending Underground lines.
Almost a billion on Wembley? why? it's still in the middle of a residential area with rubbish transport links. Why not build it next to the NEC ? 2 motorways, an airport close byand about 15,000 car parking spaces next to it and a helluva lot easier to get to for the overwhelming majority of the country.
But it's not London.
The rest of the county pay tax too and what do we get?
I'm more than happy to live here, but the nearest railway station is an hour's drive away. They can't even sort out the mess of all trains going to the SW having to go along the sea front at Dawlish. They keep saying it's going to be improved, much like the hideous traffic bottlenecks if you drive here.
But this isn't London.
Rant over.
Most of that money didn't benefit most Londoners either.
I never met a single person who had a paid job for the Olympics
On a similar note, The railway network would benefit from a Birmingham H-STD: Higher-Speed Talking Dialect infrastructure.
Theoooyyy jussst tawwwllllkkk seeoowwww sleeeooooooowlllllooooy!!!
If this was addressed, the cumulative effect caused by hundreds of Brummie ticket buyers at booths in Birmingham and London would enable trains to set off 3 hours earlier, thus alleviating the need for a high speed network altogether.
I lived and worked in London from the early 1970s until 1987. When we moved up north to Cheshire. It was a few years since I last went to London and I felt like a country bumpkin. I can only imagine what a dreadful rat race London must be now.
I live in South Cheshire in lovely rural scenery and very near to the Peak District. I would not want to move back down south now and probably not afford it.
Things like the millilenium dome were put up in the most innacessible part of London they could find for an event venue.
At least The NEC is in the centre of England. Major art gallerys and Museums etc are all around London. Send some of this funding to the rest of the country to enjoy.
Support the places where traditional industry has been neglected and destroyed with little else offered.
Do I sound political? This is the second such comment in 2 days. Just don't get me going on second homes.
'You must have some bread with it me duck!'