We are quite sophisticated at fraud through taxpayer funded contracts to rich mates.

@John_Wood_

7 ай бұрын

yes, the whole thing was a cover.

@Zerpentsa6598

7 ай бұрын

Keep going. Keep voting Tory.

"Poor management" is a pretty generous description. The whistleblowers make it sound more like outright fraud.

@Peacefulnessxxx

7 ай бұрын

It is from insiders its literally the aristocracy having a tax money grab here and there at our expense with jobs created in certain seats.

@jamesdodds9407

7 ай бұрын

another case for Scottish Independence, how much r of UK money went into this project of no benefit to them and future proposed extend "up to Scotland" completely gone. look at example of Forth Bridge replacement sadly we are still linked to this UK failure

@NeoECCHI

7 ай бұрын

@@jamesdodds9407 "another case" scotland is a failed country, drug and murder capital of europe. your largest trading partner is also england, your country would be bust in years. if that.

@Saucisse_Praxis

7 ай бұрын

Neoliberalism in a nutshell

@marcinboguslawski

7 ай бұрын

@@Saucisse_Praxis corrupt conservatism id say

But Japan's population density is pretty high too. I think the key is corruption and bureaucracy as you touched on.

@raykenley

7 ай бұрын

China and Japan built high speed train base on military and goods transport purposes first, transportation for commute second. Or else they will not lost billion every year just to maintain and keep it running. Even Taiwan's high speed train merely make a profit. I do not think the ticket for Hs2 will be cheap and affordable when it finish. This is a complete waste of money and fraud on the table.

@mitsuyamaeda-railfan

7 ай бұрын

Basically, Japan's railways are maintained through private revenue. I think you should interview JR Tokai, JR West, JR Kyushu, Hankyu Corporation, Kinki Nippon Railway, etc.

@jeremybarker7577

7 ай бұрын

The population density in Japan is on average higher than in the UK (326/sq km vs 277/sq km). It is also a pretty mountainous country meaning that less of the land is suitable for building on, so housing density is really high in many places.

@nlpnt

7 ай бұрын

How much new right-of-way has Japan bought in recent times? Shinkansen mainline was bought in the late '50s/early '60s.

@mitsuyamaeda-railfan

7 ай бұрын

@@nlpnt Construction of the Hokuriku Shinkansen line between Kanazawa and Tsuruga (125km) began in August 2012 and is scheduled to open on March 16, 2024. Also, additional costs were required due to changes in seismic standards, and it seems to have come to around 1,677.9 billion yen, but I don't know if this is the final amount. By the way, although it is in Japanese, the outline of the construction can be found at the URL below. www.jrtt.go.jp/project/1_monitoring_20230630.pdf

When the Jamaican government made a request to the UK government to build a couple highways thru the mountains on the island, The UK government told the Jamaican government that they were unable to do it and it would be impossible. The Jamaican government gave the contract to a Chinese Engineer contractor called CHEC and the rest is history.

@Kindness-qz7xr

6 ай бұрын

Evil doers shall fade away

@globalismoblackman

6 ай бұрын

They never really care about us #LateMichaelJackson

@James-st9uu

5 ай бұрын

Why would the uk government be getting involved in a Jamaican infrastructure project?

@Stewy-xw9fz

5 ай бұрын

@@James-st9uuthat’s a enormously $tup!d question. They get involved in a Jamaican infrastructure project because there are huge profits to be made from toll collection. Millions upon millions of tourist visit Jamaica yearly, they rent vehicle at the airport, they drive on highway to get to their hotels. These highways would require them to pay a toll or tolls, similar to Orlando. To get to Disney world quickly, you need to pay a toll or tolls. If you want to get stuck on I-4 for hours be my guest. English government is crap, not the people, the government. Most developing country is thankful for China to assist them in developing and being self reliant.

@thecrimsondragon9744

4 ай бұрын

Stupid question. ​@@James-st9uu

1850: The sun never sets on the British Empire 2023: Why can't we do what France does?

@joem0088

7 ай бұрын

1850: The sun never sets on the British Empire - you still live on nostalgia ?

@Inspector-Chisholm

7 ай бұрын

@@joem0088 . Really?🙄

@joem0088

7 ай бұрын

@@Inspector-Chisholm Really. Where is the British Empire ? Just England, Wales and a few Carribean islands. India is gone. Nothing in Africa ... Scotland is still there but they keep talking about leaving.

@kamsunleong6648

7 ай бұрын

​@@joem0088Diego Garcia. You colonized the island, remove the natives and the lease it to the Americans to build their naval base. Shame. Please return it to the Chargos natives.

@widodoakrom3938

7 ай бұрын

Lol

The UK is sick, and I guess that is for a large part because UK politics is sick. Hope you get better and elect smarter politicians in the future, but so far it has been downhill at least the last 5 years.

@treyquattro

7 ай бұрын

since the 90s

@MyKharli

7 ай бұрын

since 1600`s@@treyquattro

@andrewharris3900

7 ай бұрын

Politicians are captured by voting blocs so can’t really do much. Tories can’t do without the Boomer vote so love NIMBYism and low immigration. Labour are captured by the socialists and we all know how well socialism has worked across the world. Unfortunately, until the boomers pass and we get a proper Liberal government from the Tories there won’t be any change for the better.

@Dermaa

7 ай бұрын

since Thatcher

@kubhlaikhan2015

4 ай бұрын

Yes, Thatcher was the beginning of the rot. She was the first to attack Constitutional law, undermine democracy with the invention of the "SDP", wage class war against the unions, deregulate the Financial sector, close down industry, throw open the doors to globalist corporations and destroy public housing. And a few other things. Every current ill can be traced to short-term and short-sighted Thatcherite initiatives. Even so, most of the actual damage was done by BLAIR.

I worked on the Crossrail project in a 3 way joint venture Contractor partnership , 1 British, 1 Dutch, 1 Spanish Contractor. We built the tunnels and the station platform concourses and corridors to the Western section from Royal Oak to Liverpool Street. Total cost £850 million at 2015 prices. The job went like clockwork. We can compete with other countries but HS2 was a political brainchild with no thought or detailed planning behind it.

The UK isn't alone in building infrastructure so expensively. The same often happens in the US, and for some of the same reasons.

@pbworld7858

7 ай бұрын

I saw a video the other day where they gave some stats. The cost of building a metro in USA is about 10 times that of countries like Spain.

@alanc457

7 ай бұрын

Higher quality costs more right?

@Ranjan_Mohanty

7 ай бұрын

@@alanc457 higher quality of corruption, you mean ?

@andrewharris3900

7 ай бұрын

NIMBYies using and misusing regulations to drive up costs to try and halt a project. Any private project is easily stopped using regulations, government projects though are funded by taxpayers so don’t tap out to the NIMBYies early on.

@henghistbluetooth7882

7 ай бұрын

@@alanc457The US problem definitely isn’t one of quality. As anyone who has to take a train, use an airport or drive over a bridge in the US can testify to. And their congressional budget system is a joke - they are less than two weeks from a shutdown with a dark-ages religious zealot trying to control the purse strings. Anything approaching HS2 would be imposible in the US. Here it’s expensive but I live 7 miles from one of the stations and it is being built at a rate of knots.

UK has a stop / go attitude to rail. After HS1, HS lines should have started immediately, say East Mid to Leeds, Leeds Manxchester, and so on. You never see new Motorway building stop.

Gareth Dennis had an extensive analysis of the reasons for the high cost and one of the main ones he gets to in the end is that the UK economy is built on rentier extraction so the money is made mostly by a long chain of middle men that raises the cost.

The parallels with our white elephant California HSR are eerie. Exploding costs and construction of a less useful part of the route are just 2

@kamsunleong6648

7 ай бұрын

The Chinese help build their Pacific transcontinental railway back in the 1800s. Should have rehired the Chinese. They would completed it by now.

A key issue are UK property laws. Because of these, the majority of the tracks are underground here. Such laws don’t exist elsewhere and the governments of other countries have the right to take possession of land for critical infrastructure projects

@Langevloei-NL

6 ай бұрын

Expropriation laws. We have them in The Netherlands. But you get good money for it.

The UK's paradoxical mix of higher proportion of rural space than many Western countries and high population density is unique to the UK. According to the World Bank, 78% of the UK's land area is rural, compared to 60% in Germany, 52% in France, and 38% in the United States.Study by the author Guy Shrubsole found that the aristocracy and gentry still own around 30% of England. William himself own 0.2%. Of course people like that have no influence behind the scene. Do they?

@Iondaime100

7 ай бұрын

don't you think that france had a point in 1789 with there aristocracy

@erongi233

7 ай бұрын

@@Iondaime100Converting their chinless into their headless you mean? I have no views on that.

The Brits should have ask the Chinese to build it for them.

@kamsunleong6648

7 ай бұрын

Politics don't allow this. Eventhough it's the smart thing to do. Pretty sure the planners know this.

UK gave up infrastructres long time ago. Also gave up manufacturing too as they out source and concentrate on making easy money through tourism or anything that was easy money and less work.

The issue is incompetence in the government. Ministers don't know how to vet and manage large construction projects, and rely too heavily on private sector consultants. More engineers and industrialists are required in government not lawyers and media experts. Secondly cabinet ministers are more concerned about their individual brands which have a very short life cycle. They gravitate to cheap short term election cycle wins ahead of long term projects with benefits that play out over generations.

@TrevorWilliams-fq8mg

5 ай бұрын

100% agree with you. But politics being what it is means the politicians know nothing about anything.

A direct connection between HS1&HS2. Then it would be possible to take the train between Birmingham and Paris, without transfer in London. Poor planing😞

@Smart1529

Ай бұрын

And maybe Stratford could finally get international service. These people has let the country down time and time again 😔

TBF 50B for HS2 is probably still a tolerable price. HSR is one of those projects we cannot afford not to build. I do also think we could get more if we had more affordable projects, but I'd still vote to bite the bullet on this one.

@jasonlee4267

7 ай бұрын

it literally isnt, and 50 billion is not the final cost either, its a disgrace and is nowhere near an acceptable price tag for a vanity project that has been mishandled at every step, china can build 35000km of high speed track in 10 years, and we can even build what 120 miles in that time, if you think that is tolerable you are part of the problem.

@mohammedsarker5756

7 ай бұрын

@@jasonlee4267 china is NOT a good comparison to the UK, 50B pounds for a regional economic development project between London and the Midlands is a great deal, the problem is that poor management let it skyrocket well past that point

Unfortunately you fail to mention China's HSR (now at about 40,000 km in total) built at a cost of around US$19m/km in very technically challenging terrain. Converting your £/mile for HS2 to US$/km gives a UK cost of US$243m/km. In other words UK built HSR cost around twenty (20) times as much per km as China. Perhaps the UK should let people who know how to build HSR, on schedule and budget, do the work.

@kamsunleong6648

7 ай бұрын

Pretty sure privately they would have loved to hire the Chinese. But politically not possible.

@widodoakrom3938

7 ай бұрын

​@@kamsunleong6648then ask France or japan

@fookcheonkhaw7147

7 ай бұрын

Beware of Japanese made trains. Remember the high speed trains built by Hitachi were found with cracks in the Great Western Railway. The workmanship and quality of Japanese trains have deteriorated over the years.

@mindguru22

7 ай бұрын

Btw Chinese metro/subway construction cost is around 220m $/km. So how can they make HSR in 19m/km. The data is dodgy and shouldn’t be even considered.😮

@grouchypatch9185

7 ай бұрын

​@@widodoakrom3938japan? A prolonged delay in india and Vietnam.

I’m working on HS2 - from a consultant perspective there are two factors I have noticed that are definitely driving the design costs up: 1 - HS2’s undefined scope - it has evolved over the years and we are continuously redesigning 2 - Over-engineering required by HS2

The London-Birmingham and Cologne-Frankfurt routes are comparable, both around 190 kilometers long. The construction of the German route took seven years and the costs amounted to around six billion euros: On July 25, 2002, the ICE route between Cologne and Frankfurt was opened. Here you can travel with the ICE at speeds of up to 300 km/h. The trip lasts approximately 50 minutes to 1 hour.

@AL5520

7 ай бұрын

The Madrid Barcelona 621km line was built in 12 years for almost 9B Euros, which is 14.4M Euros per kilometer (~23M per mile). The total current network cost (4000km) is less than 70B Euros and there are quite a few new new ones under construction (next one to open should be on November 30th to Asturias). As said here, we keep it simple but high quality. We don't over do it, not extravagant stations or necessary bridges or tunnels (and we do have them as Spain is one of the most mountainous country in Europe, the mentioned Asturias one and the future Basque one are mostly in tunnels).

@grahamf695

7 ай бұрын

The biggest mistake was to start in London, the most densely populated part of the route. They should have started with Manchester, Liverpool and Leeds to Birmingham.

@alaindumas1824

7 ай бұрын

The routes are comparable but note the difference. There are no stations on HS2 between London and Birmingham suburbs. The line goes through counties having no incentive in making it work. You built 3 stations in Montaubaur (only 12000 inhabitants), Limburg (34000) and Sieburg.

@nettcologne9186

7 ай бұрын

@@alaindumas1824 Yes, that's right. And if you really think about it, there is another stop at Cologne Airport. At the 3 stops you mentioned, it was built so that trains can rush through there without having to slow down. There are trips between Cologne and Frankfurt several times an hour without stopping, but some trains also have to stop once an hour in the small towns of Montabaur and Limburg. The stop in Siegburg/Bonn is visited frequently as around 800,000 people live here.

@antiti4ever

7 ай бұрын

The same distance high speed rails (350km/hr-380km/hr) will cost 100-120 million RMB yuan (US$21m) per KM, and take about 3 month to build in mainland China.

Anything to do with state investment in the UK is considered a waste of public money or something to be privatised if it can generate some profit for cronies, ever since the days of Thatcher. I don't think that attitude is changing anytime soon, and by the time it does there will be too much catching up to do. Tories and Con-Lite governments such as that of Blair don't see any benefit in anything that generates long term positive outcomes.

@andrewharris3900

7 ай бұрын

Profit guides what is worth doing. If your product/service is desired then people will pay for it.

@cpkingadam5

7 ай бұрын

@@andrewharris3900 Profit can be intangible when talking about infrastructure. How much money do roads 'make'? None, bar the M6 toll, but we'd be pretty economically stuffed without them. Unrealised gains through underinvestment is what is making our country poor

@andrewharris3900

7 ай бұрын

@@cpkingadam5 roads do make money though fuel duty. The more you drive the more fuel you use the more fuel duty you pay. It’s not perfect but roads do make a profit.

@cpkingadam5

7 ай бұрын

@@andrewharris3900 Fuel duty doesn't even make a dent

Even 50 years ago at Uni I knew the economic benefits of a Network rather than a mere Link. Now, that is all we have...a link to Birmingham. When I see freight trains sidetracked on loops (that were once slow lines) and I watch those trains rushing through in the wee hours, that is why we need the capacity for the old lines to take the freight and the new to run the expresses.

Out of curiosity, you say the UK has relatively low skilled workers compared to some countries in EU. But why is this the case to begin with?

@mittfh

7 ай бұрын

Since the 1980s, there's been a managed decline in British industry, with the sentiment in government being that if British companies can't outcompete foreign companies, then they deserve to fail. A variety of imported goods were cheaper than British made equivalents, so the government felt it pointless to subsidise British companies. Meanwhile, companies would lay off staff when recessions hit, then due to strong government incentives for the former workforce to find new employment elsewhere, couldn't recruit sufficient numbers of staff when recessions ended. Particularly after the 2008 recession, they felt the economy wasn't stable enough to invest in training new staff (fearing they could go to all the expense of training them, only for another economic showdown requiring them to lay off the bulk of their workforce again), so instead imported workers from elsewhere (mainly the EU). The workers would also typically not be employed on a permanent basis but just for the duration of a contract, so they'd come over here for a few years then return when their contract ended. Hence also the government's frequently stated aim of reducing net migration to tens of thousands was always going to be unachievable (never mind that international students also count in the figures, so any increase in international student places at universities pushes up the figures as they stay for 3-4 years).

Because, like many governments, they do not contact in decent project management professionals. Govt contracts have 2 rules: 1 win - print variation books; 2 when any govt aligned persons says anything in any way fill out variation.

I haven’t heard the word “corruption” in this video. Anybody else also believes this should have been an indispensable topic? 🤔

@stvdmc2011

7 ай бұрын

Democracy doesn't have corruption, only non white run countries have corruption.

@eslofftschubar206

7 ай бұрын

Corruption implies intent, but the British ceased to do anything intentionally long time ago. HS2 is just a manifestation of the failure the UK has become.

@andrewharris3900

7 ай бұрын

Because it’s not corruption. It’s just the inefficient system that we’ve built where every man and his dog gets a say on if you’re allowed to build or not. Then even if you do get the go ahead they can drag you through the system of regulations to drive up your costs till you decide it’s just not worth it. Government though has taxpayer money and doesn’t tap out early like private companies.

@gumbs2537

7 ай бұрын

I agree a lot of backhanded payments, further more the country does lack skilled workers. Let’s not forget a year ago today construction and steel work was crying out for steel fixers and ground workers. Truth is you kiss ass you get work and why was there not a outside company doing the construction audit to make sure money was getting disputed fairly. I see mixer owners selling their wagons now? Why is that. Greedy!!!

Looking at your video, the old building/construction technologies employed enabled me to understand why the UK cost of such projects is so high. Look at China in its new machines and building techniques that it invented and employed in building its HSR, The UK way of construction pails by miles.

£3300 for every income taxpayer in the country! For a train service that absolutely no one will use because it goes between suburbs not where people actually want to go, An absolute scandal!

@RockyRacoon66

7 ай бұрын

It is worse than that! £3300 per tax payer is the price of building but since we have a 2 trillion pound public debt, the money spent on this will be subject to financing cost for decades, possible for ever!

@vorong2ru

7 ай бұрын

And don't forget the tickets are going to cost a fortune too. I predict £100 for Birmingham to London, which means it won't be in use by many and likely to be yet another Virgin/Avanti for corporate travel.

@mikaelbohman6694

7 ай бұрын

From somewhere to nowhere.

@thomasgray4188

7 ай бұрын

the railway infrastructure strategy understander has logged on.

@gumbs2537

7 ай бұрын

I agree with you. Why didn’t they upgrade the high Wycombe line, new denham to Birmingham or Aylesbury. People that live in Aylesbury have to travel back to high Wycombe or London to go north…. The finical government or journalists that have balls need to look into everything. Could be just a plot twist way farmers are close friends need money so we will do a Coe to milk the government, let’s not forget the nhs scandal during covid and so many private companies was selling hand sanitizer and we as the public couldn’t buy in on the profits, shares…..

Dont forget. The biggest cost was scrapping it! Thats the biggest mistake.

"The soil is too soft". Meanwhile in the Netherlands and Belgiun, the HSL is up and running and has been for ages.

The Uk is able to engineer great things and build huge projects - but our government’s or authorities can't.

@andrewharris3900

7 ай бұрын

Can’t do shit in the UK. Too much regulation and every man and his dog gets a say on if you’re allowed to build or not.

@qjtvaddict

7 ай бұрын

@@andrewharris3900exactly end common law

@andrewharris3900

7 ай бұрын

@@qjtvaddict absolutely nothing to do with abolishing Common Law. A Common Law system can respect property rights (it currently doesn’t but it could and should).

I heard of those ventilation shafts elsewhere - now we have those also in Austria, made up to look like a barn from teh distance in touristy areas - and I can not belive that cost a lot - likely "overengineered" i the UK, too

You hit the nail on the head on all points.

The £50bn WASNT wasted !! The money came for public coffers, and via a string of government managed contracts, the £50bn has now ended up as proper (normal) cash which to a large extent now has gone to very good friends of the Tories, the construction company bosses….. Only God knows how much money was actually spent on HS2. Surely only a fraction of the taxpayer bill…

@garyb455

7 ай бұрын

this was a Labour project

@CRingsing

7 ай бұрын

@@garyb455HS2 as an idea is obvs good. A country this size and wealthy should obvs have a fast train service. Unluckily for the country, the project was started under the Tories who treated it as yet another opportunity to give top job to friends, and to bleed the budgets dry. Exactly as the Tories did in Woking, building rubbish real estate for £1.2bn, valued at £300m just a year later. It always happens when those uneducated Tory tossers are involved.

@CRingsing

7 ай бұрын

That being said, both HS2 and the disaster in Woking has made a lot of Tory voters with friends in higher places millionaires. I guess that’s a good thing for them 😂😂😂

@mittfh

7 ай бұрын

​@@garyb455Labour came up with the idea and pencilled in the route, but finalisation of the exact route, taking it through planning, dealing with legal objections from dozens of councils, purchasing the land and starting construction was all done under Conservative governments.

Please let me if know if the Old Oak Common station was always planned to exist and to be so grand? Is it designed to be an interchange from the north to Heathrow? The tories flogged off to their mates the HS1 line for £3bn although it cost almost £6bn to construct. It’s also one of the most expensive lines to use in Europe per train mile/km. In Germany the High Speed lines run up to 300kph, surely the aim of HS2 would to serve Glasgow and Edinburgh in the long term hence line should be capable of 300kph. The French or the Chinese should have been awarded the contract, the incredibly poor management of Crossrail, all transferred to HS2 fir their £150+K salaries after huge delays and vast cost over runs. I believe the base Saint Gotthard rail tunnel was completed early and under budget.

If it is true that this HS2 railway line should have been designed for a maximum speed of 400 km/h, then this would mean a completely new and therefore very expensive technology - while, for example, Spain or the Czechia design their HS lines according to French standards for a maximum speed 350 km/h (realistically 320 km/h).

Considering our railways are struggling with room for more trains! why was the Midland Line from Manchester to London Marlybone line closed down?

How many Brits believe that over 75% of the world's HSR are running in China? And believe the trains cover almost all major cities and the mileage keeps on expanding.

The Chiltern Tunnels cost the North its access to a vital piece of levelling-up infrastructure. It must be remembered that HS2 Ltd is an arm of the state, so it seems the state failed to manage costs (caving in to Chiltern NIMBYism for example), then cancelled it because costs were too high!

One of the largest if not the largest problems of the UK is that its entire economy and life gravitates around London and rest of the country is merely an appendix to it. Is it a positive development making Birmingham a suburb of London? The entire point of HS2 is feeding people into London. It is an extremely londoncentric project. Wouldn't be more useful restoring the decrepit railways all over the country and most importantly, making them affordable and reliable? This type of railway around Europe is extremely expensive, mostly a toy for rich tourists and corporate travel. The plebs have to get around with regional trains, buses and low cost flights. This will be even worse in the UK as taking the train is already ridiculously expensive and has an insane price structure. Why do you need a super premium train, and imagine what absurd its ticket would cost the way the railways are managed now. I say this as a former train driver and someone who loves trains: HS2 shouldn't be built. The regular people won't benefit from this and it will appease to the only demographic this government cares about: rich people in London. Surely the government didn't take this decision for the same reasons as me but the country dodged a bullet anyway

UK should ask French groups to built high speed train years ago because French use it since 1981 😅

The things we don't know,like where about some of the money is going ,a local canal restoration charity got funding from hs2 for some of its work in the Lichfield area

We have a similar cost and delivery problem with nuclear and for many of the same reasons. Ours is now a rentier economy.

Its a total success ..for a few contractors and lobbyists and landowners .

I am sure that environmental & road safety have added to the cost of HS2. But if something is worth doing it’s worth doing well.

Thank you, great summary of this Tory Driven Catastrophic Decision.

It wasn't wasted, the money was stolen

It will be harder and harder to create massive infrastructure such as rail networks in the future. Comparing to China, large workforce, people are willing to work 10 hours per day, where as British only work 5 hours per day in average. Moreover, population not large enough to justify the cost of building HSR

Imagine somebody suggesting the Manchester Ship Canal today, or the railway infrastructure and water systems that saw the Lake District linked to taps in Didsbury. We don’t make heroic figures like Donald Campbell, we don’t have men like Bobby Charlton and we can’t build, can’t win. We are very good at apologizing and for that we should all be very sorry.

It has to be over engineered because we have no plans to maintain the new railway and no budget to replace bits that fail. All bridges in the UK have to have a minimum 500 year lifespan.

While the huge sums mentioned (1:50 and 4:05) may well have been "mouthwatering" to contractors, for taxpayers these are better described as *eye-watering* amounts of money.

What about Indonesia High speed rail???

Looking forward to seeing the East & West Midlands & NorthWest & NorthEast Rapid Speed Rail Loops being delivered within the next five or so years.

large scale projects require integrity in the project environment. Much like a building requires a sound foundation forsit to stand. The political/economic environment requires integrity. UK has no chance.

The downside of the UK political system becomes apparent when politicians prioritize short-term livelihood issues such as tax cuts and subsidies to gain votes during elections, while neglecting investments in large-scale infrastructure. Although these infrastructure investments may take longer to yield benefits and require collaboration among political parties, the difficulty lies in the public's ability to attribute positive outcomes to any specific party. This emphasizes the limitations of the UK political system.

If you look at the engineering and environmental requirements of the building of this project, I'm not surprised it's not costing even more!!! I think it's a tremendous project but very expensive. I look forward to travelling on it 1 day!!

I am a train fan too . but i would not want a new high speed railway blasting thru my neighborhood . A cozy branch line perhaps narrow gauge would be interesting . I dont want a highway neither but in the end i might be able to use the highway so .............

But we have built Concorde, The Channel Tunnel; Cross Rail, Bridges across major Estuaries a Motorway Network - we have achieved major projects. Rail has to be shoehorned into existing country., he does admit to Density.

Thanks for this excellent video analysis about an important and highly relevant topic. 👍 I'd like to point out the following: 2:40 The ESTIMATED cost *doubled* over just the first 2 years (2011-22), from ~£40 to ~£80 billion, but then *it remained about the same for the next 8 years* until inflation arrived in 2020, following the Covid-19 pandemic and the Ukraine War. _How could the ESTIMATED cost DOUBLE in just one year?_ *Because contractors underbid to secure the contract, so the original estimate is too LOW! Instead, £90 billion is closer to the real cost of the project, so actually COSTS HAVEN'T SPIRALLED AT ALL.* This is a false narrative, which was used by the govt as an excuse to cancel it! Also, as you mention, (5:40) much of the increased cost was due to extra tunnelling being required for the London to Birmingham line, to avoid digging up the countryside, including the Chilterns. *However, these costs would not have been incurred on the Leeds or Manchester sections, so if these (more important) sections had been built first, they would've been much cheaper to complete!*

UK and USA 🇺🇸 trends to believe that the project delivery “Design and Build” which main contractors are solely responsible for all design and build issues. They believe this type of contract will bought down the price of construction and make site activities more efficient. 😂 However, I see it as same as Net Zero policy that most studies will just ignore its restrictions and raise its merits. I believe everything has its tread hold😅. Think about your house extension, why people always tell you how important to hire an architect to monitor the project and never only contract to builders. There is Nothing you can do if the builder start to raise the price at the end of project and treating you they leave.😢

There should have to be a referendum for amounts above a certain value before gov wastes our money!

32 miles of tunnels through the home counties (NIMBYS) and vanity bridges are the reason why this project was so over budget. The 20 million in the North have been ignored again. Levelling up is a joke in this country and the levelling up minister Gove (who is Scottish) is a clown.

It's almost like privatization with a health amount of competition is the best way to get the most out of public and private investment as governments are irresponsible and inefficient with the same input of capital.

It was the wrong kind of snow not leaves!

"over engineered" 200km/h? If UK politicians would think twice, they would have let a Chinese company build it and get 350km/h still for less than what you pay now, and it would maybe already be done. We have similar issues in Sweden, overpaying still getting nothing and the 180km/h you cant even have a drink on the table without risk it would fall over.

@jeremybarker7577

7 ай бұрын

HS2 is designed for trains to operate at 400 km/h even though none of the trains on order can go that fast. Most recent TGV lines in France have a design speed of 350 km/h but operate at no more than 320 km/h. The design of HS1 was pretty much a copy of a French TGV line.

@JoelBergmark

7 ай бұрын

@@jeremybarker7577 Great that's better speeds, in Sweden they talk about high speed, I was on one 3 weeks ago and it went 120km/h for lost of the way and occasionally 150km/h. In China this summer the norm speed was 350 km/h and very rarely 230km/h. Pity for UK and Europe to fall behind so much

@nikkiparksy

5 ай бұрын

So spend on tofu dreg construction instead of building a good product in the 1st place . Way too waste more money in the long run . Chinese construction is called Tofu Dreg by the Chinese people for a reason check it out.

One example of money being wasted, be it incompetence or fraud, are the construction works near us. Near a small village, Offchurch, Warwickshire, around 20 lovely mature trees were cut down along with ancient hedgerows. Now as we see the HS2 work progress, these trees were nowhere near where the track is being built and it is quite clear they did not need to go. Someone used the cover of HS2 to make off with a large amount of valuable timbre. Maybe a small thing on the HS2 scale of things but how many times has this scam been repeated over the whole length of the construction.

4:00 Mouth-watering if you're the contractor. Eye-watering for the poor buggers paying for it, namely, us.

5:18 everytime i see something like this, an elevated railway over flat land, i think to myself, do they have too much money :D The cost, and all the maintenance over time... no wonder germany can build stuff so much cheaper, since we don´t do this kind of design, we just dump huge loads of rubble to make an embankment that is basically maintenance free once piled up and stabilized.

The issue is the same as it always is, poor management by the dft. they didn’t conduct any lessons learned reviews from hs1 and as we build infrastructure so rarely nobody had any real experience in any aspect of the project, leading to an overreliance on very expensive contractors who focus exclusively on short term goals because they know full well when budgets get chopped contractors are the first to go. Add to that very basic mistakes such as announcing the full budget ahead of time so all the contracting agencies were bidding for a ‘slice of the pie’ rather than delivering anything close to value for money, the governments woeful contract writing and vetting skills and interference from local mps that insisted on constant changes and revisions. Plus every company involved insisted on generous get out clauses because there is no faith anywhere that the government wouldn’t just axe the project the moment things got difficult (which they did)

A few big things missed, cost per mile is misleading as project costs often inckude different things, not leastbthe uk includes trauns, depots, stations that wouldn't be included in a typical french or Spanish cost as they'd be separate projects or not necessary.

Selling off land so the project can’t be restarted is almost criminal. One can only hope that Sunak is dethroned soon and that a new PM will restart the project.

Because despite reports going back for decades government and industry just do not understand value based procurement with the collaborative leadership style to maximise the benefits of this whole system aporoach

They should have extended HS1 from London through to Birmingham & Manchester to Glasgow & Edinburgh. There would be some point travelling from Edinburgh to Paris and beyond

Highest possible speeds have rolling benefits. Birmingham to London is too close to see the benefit, but how about Birmingham to Paris? A proper connection from London Euston to HS1 would mean through running on the Eurostar from Birmingham to Paris. This is why Birmingham station being a terminal station is dumb, and should have been designed for through running up to Manchester. It just seems pretty myopic/simplistic to declare the project a white elephant without contextualizing for a future where carbon emissions should be lowered as much as possible.

And all so you can get to Birmingham from London 36 minutes quicker. Providing the RMT are not on strike and the wrong type of leaves aren't on the track of course.

@jeremybarker7577

7 ай бұрын

The fundamental reason for building HS2 is to provide additional capacity - not cutting journey times.

@josephinebennington7247

7 ай бұрын

Not when you’ve got to schlep out to the suburbs first!

For that £50 billion wasted on HS2, Rolls Royce could have built 25 of their small modular reactors, providing huge amounts of safe, emission free electricity, that would have benefitted everyone across the country instead of 1% of the population that might use a train line.

The Chiltern View Preservation District - taxed at 50% of the increase in costs due to tunneling. The residents demand that the rest of the country bear the cost of preserving their quality of life without a comparable sacrifice on their part. , It's a case of socialize the costs and privatize the benefits. Their properties will increase in value; Make them contribute some of that increased value to the common good. put up or shut up. And if the UK's tax system can't capture the increase, that's a sign that the system needs to be reformed…..

Because the gov has paid billions to ‘consulting’ firms for the HS2😂😂

Engineering projects in the UK is a complete failure and the country has fallen/is falling further behind. It was misnamed as it was capacity incl freight that was the real benefit not speed. Now the motorways will take the heavy eight of haulage and not rail (until road repairs go sky-high). Hard to see a bright-side ahead.

@jeremybarker7577

7 ай бұрын

The idea of HS2 is that most long distance trains (including a majority of trains from north of Birmingham) would use it rather than the existing line with the freed up capacity of the existing line being available for additional local and freigh trains.

So much from Government Departments (of both sides) seems to have been about what we CAN'T do...not about what we CAN do. HS2 is like the Channel Tunnel. The Channel Tunnel was started and stopped due to cost issues etc. Finally, we decided to just do it! And now look...It works well. It is convenient and if I hasn't yet paid for itself yet, it will do over time. We use it because it is convenient; and it has been extended to Brussels and Amsterdam. I think we should continue with extending it from Birmingham (with the entire HS2 project - up to the North of England) Let's JUST DO IT!!! It will be one the most efficient and advanced high speed railways in the world. It will showcase what we CAN do! Yes, it will cost a lot of money. And yes, we must work economically, but NOT the the detriment of the project! Let's just BITE THE BULLET AND GET IT DONE!! It will help to Level Up the North, it will connect many major cities and it will pave the way to extending it further to: Glasgow and Edinburgh, Cardiff and Swansea, perhaps Norwich and Plymouth too. Connecting the cities in the UK, in this way, will only help our economy...and goodness knows it needs some help at present. The French had issues over the cost of their TGV railway, but they got it done! I have ridden it all the way to Milan. It was fabulous! Let's be fabulous too! For crying out loud!!

Why Anglophone countries so bad at building high speed rail??

@pbworld7858

7 ай бұрын

I'm wondering whether it's just a coincidence or whether there's a reason. USA, Canada, Australia, NZ, UK.

@ausbrum

7 ай бұрын

@@pbworld7858 The first three are geographically large, and really have no need of high speed rail

@pbworld7858

7 ай бұрын

@@ausbrum Yeah, and China is a tiny country. Even Russia has some HSR. Don't tell me, Russia is as small as the Vatican City. UK and NZ are yuuuuge.

the classic was ending up at royal oak and not euston, so f'd up and pointless

UK should have kept the Chinese construction company for the project.

Bonfire of vanities. Love it.

4:16 ah i can see china hsr have more Pople density than uk. Or jepang or Indonesian hsr also

Why left out China's high-speed train from the price comparison?

@blackknight4996

7 ай бұрын

It will be too embarrassing...

Is there anything the UK is good at? 😅

@atlasnetwork7855

7 ай бұрын

Yes, but we need different management. Unfortunately both our political parties are equally corrupt.

@slothsarecool

7 ай бұрын

@@atlasnetwork7855 honestly curious haha, what would you say the UK does well?

@borisj

7 ай бұрын

Creating policies that generate wealthy retirees, who become faithful Tory voters. And wealthy bankers. That's it.

@oldskoolmusicnostalgia

7 ай бұрын

Binge drinking, exporting the Premier League to the world, accepting large scale money laundering. Those are not bad "side hustles" but they were foolish enough to think they could build an entire economy on these.

@Tototoo88

7 ай бұрын

We do corruption and mismanagement pretty well. We're also great at ignoring poverty and putting the rich and powerful before others.

It's not building, it's planning. When you mix a strong dose of geopolitics in planning, you get what you deserve

At least one day in the future it WILL have to be extended because a West London suburb just to Brimingham is not worth its salt - unless you specially want to go to/from west London, you can go just as quick from Euston, and without having to pay premium high speed fares !!!!. So, the whole project will be a total white elephant until the line is extended.!!

We have a two party state - Labour and Conservative - has that got anything to do with it?

Poor management, corruption, massively overpriced component costs.

HS2 was never about speed, it was about capacity

This is shocking considering the UK invented the train and railways

the likes of Balfour Beatty cant pull off these types of infrastructure without going way over costs. when you make safety onsite as ridiculous as these hs2 contractors do its a green light for no work to happen

You should have included how the HS1-HS2 link was cancelled in 2014

are they selling the tunnels off cheap?

thanks for the info,firstly the start of hs2 should have started close heathrow airport and on a viaduct and having no tunnels at all,its being build wrong ,building sites every where along the route,like i said start at heathrow and work ur way along abit at a time ,not sites all over the place, and what is wrong, with the british worker ,they want the best of both worlds

@TrevorWilliams-fq8mg

5 ай бұрын

And how much disruption with the resulting cost would that have caused to build all the viaducts above the existing infrastructure? And building 1piece at a time would add another 30 years to the programme with 30 years of additional inflation.

Paris to where?😮

if UK gives contract to China, 1/3 budget and 3-4 years completed. it's so simple.

@jamesgreen1116

7 ай бұрын

The uks masters in the usa will never ever allow that though.

China could build HS2 in full in 5 years. Our political system is designed to do a little as possible.

@JustLikeBuildingThings

7 ай бұрын

It might only last 5 years though, but yeah I agree generally we have huge spends on consultancies/advisory and little on the doing.

@yellowgreen5229

7 ай бұрын

I think it represents a few months of Chinese communist rail line expansion. Britain is a capitalist dystopia.

@liamcollinson5695

7 ай бұрын

I'm not sure I would trust the Chinese with they whole tofu dregs building code the thing would probably collapse before it was complete

@Jim-kz4zo

7 ай бұрын

And need to be redone 3 years later after two derailments

@alkaholic4848

7 ай бұрын

Yeah but china's would be made of cheese, rarely get used, and fall apart after 3 months. Don't believe the crap you see in the mainstream media about china's huge projects, it's all for show, all propaganda. They have no freedom of speech so it's very difficult to find anyone who will tell you what's really going on there. The ones that do say it's very grim.