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Marples and Beeching

Discussion in 'Steam Traction' started by GWR4707, Jan 8, 2020.

  1. 30567

    30567 Part of the furniture Friend

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    Because Phase 1 costs 100 billion and the strategic case only makes sense if you do the whole of Phases 1, 2a and 2b which we are obviously not going to do. Everything has its price and unfortunately while 50 bn for Phase 1 was reasonable value for money provided there was political commitment to Phase 2, the project has crossed over into not vfm territory. But hey, we are doing it anyway.
     
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  2. 30854

    30854 Resident of Nat Pres

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    Plenty of "professional cockneys" too. I'm SE18, born and raised and have never sounded like an Eastenders barrow boy, nor did anyone else at my (ILEA) junior school, or either of the other two locally. Ditto secondary school, where after it 'went comp', a distinctive West Indian accent was the only significant departure from something close to 'RP'. Regarding the answer to my own question, I don't actually have the foggiest, so 'very different' would have to be some completely non-numeric response!

    Lovely book, from a notably creative mind.

    Not for a moment suggesting London is any more or less subject to 'the laws of supply and demand' (themselves not, as I recall, among those laws handed down in stone upon Mt Sinai). Just that, due to factors including population, infrastructure provision for same, presence of central government and company head offices, infrastructure to support that lot too, London reaches so many 'critical masses' which even somewhere the size of the West Midlands conurbation fall short of. Then there are the effects at scale of many entirely novel factors.

    Don't overlook the likely effects of the whole decarbonisation process on wider society either. The fact our current crop of representatives seem in the main as ill-informed as anyone else relying on an equally clueless media does nothing to change the transformation coming with a novel economic paradigm, though dogmatic adherence to their superannuated ideogies could easily act as a drag-chain, if not completely balls much of the process up, to the detriment of UKPlc.

    I invite all comers to pick any three areas of some personal interest (at least initially, it makes things so much easier when you have some existing knowledge of what you're looking at, believe me!) relevant to commerce, infrastructure or society generally, look into things for themselves and draw their own conclusions. The only questions we need ask concern the rate of change and how that change is implemented. Neither existing dominant political ideology seems particularly well suited to the task at hand.
     
  3. Jamessquared

    Jamessquared Nat Pres stalwart

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    Quite. And there is also opportunity cost - £100bn on HS 2 means £100bn not spent on other projects. Even if there is a genuine desire to "level up", you could do that more effectively by spending the same amount of money enlarge numbers of smaller projects in each area.

    Tom
     
  4. 35B

    35B Nat Pres stalwart

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    I hadn't got you down as a follower of Moses!

    More seriously, I talk about the laws of supply and demand because they work as an explanation of price. And one of the key insights (hey, it even stuck with me at A Level economics) is that when prices reach a certain point, consumers are encouraged to seek alternatives. I believe that process is underway, as the cost of being in London starts to outweigh the benefits. In my industry - IT - there is a noticeable cluster effect developing in the north east where critical mass is being reached, and potential employees are attracted by the combination of quality of life and costs of living. Government policies pushing civil servants and others out of London are also having an effect, even it's being diluted by staff being reasonably reluctant to uproot themselves.

    That's why I am confident that HS2 will not just represent a drain on other centres, aggregating yet more towards London, but will also work the other way.
     
  5. 35B

    35B Nat Pres stalwart

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    Setting aside the debate as to whether that money would be available for other projects, I'm not convinced by that logic - though to be fair I'm also no follower of Schumacher. For that assertion to be true, it would have to be true that the benefit:cost ratio of those smaller projects was greater than that of HS2. Purely as a matter of logic, that can't be presumed.

    The role of transformational change is also being discounted. Sometimes, a radical change will deliver far more effect than a series of incremental changes.

    Finally, I have a problem with the assumption that there is a do nothing option. The problem with the West Coast Main Line is fundamental - and incremental upgrades like those of the 1960s electrification and noughties PUG* plans are hugely disruptive, destroy demand while underway, while being phenomenally expensive. By building a completely new route, those issues are sidestepped, while completely new capacity not dictated to by Stephenson, Locke, etc. can be provided based on the world as it is now, not as it was at the dawn of the industrial age.

    * - 11 years, large chunks left incomplete, and cost £9bn in itself.
     
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  6. Robin

    Robin Well-Known Member Friend

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    I agree that now is not the time to do be doing it, particularly with the financial impacts of Covid and Brexit (folk can allocate their own weightings). But now its started, what else can the Government do at this stage – cancel the whole thing or commit to other stages that they know they can't afford. But going back to the Beeching era (and investment since), which is the subject of this thread, I would still pose the same question. Why would you not have a high speed line between your two biggest cities?
     
  7. Jimc

    Jimc Part of the furniture

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    I'm not entirely sure what bring back to life means, but I doubt people are going to abandon their screens and go back to socialising in public, with the obvious exception of the 15-25 age group, who tend to discourage the rest of the population. In Guildford, near where I am, its already obvious that the commercial area in the centre of town is shrinking, and areas that were being scheduled for commercial redevelopment are being rezoned for residential as retail condenses down to little more than a couple of streets and their side roads, plus out of town.
     
  8. 35B

    35B Nat Pres stalwart

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    I disagree on public socialising; I think that will recover - though I agree completely about the effect of the group you identify, even though I think the age range is broader than you suspect (shortly pre-Covid, my 50-ish boss took a group of us to the Reform Club for dinner; most of us left him at about 11:30 as he was queuing to get into a nightclub and we decided we'd had enough).
     
  9. GWR4707

    GWR4707 Nat Pres stalwart

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    Just to pick up on this one of the main drivers for the change from commercial to residential is that such a use is now permitted development making the process much easier in planning terms and also providing much needed residential development in areas where societal and social change is afoot already, even prior to the last 2 years.
     
  10. S.A.C. Martin

    S.A.C. Martin Part of the furniture

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    I don't know how many times it has to be said, but spending the money on HS2 does not automatically mean that the railway industry has lost out on money on other projects. The money for HS2 doesn't exist without that project's existence - and it certainly wouldn't have been sent the rail industry's way without a huge amount of justification for everything else that needs doing.

    The funding for rail projects and the rail industry in this country are not so easily transferable from one to another. Individual projects go through internal and contracted stages of development, rationalisation, justification, design, build and then commissioning. Everything has to be justified, everything changes monthly/weekly/daily (delete as appropriate!): my day job currently is helping to organise work-bank planning and development of change controls for spending on rail projects in signalling for Network Rail in Anglia, so I have some direct experience here. Money from one project cannot be easily (if at all) moved into another.

    There is no "right time" for big rail infrastructure projects. There will always be detractors who believe the money can be better spent elsewhere, and in this case they've had the best part of twenty years to convince the treasury, the department for transport, and the rail industry that there's better ways than HS2 to spend upwards of £50 billion. They've all failed, and repeatedly failed miserably, to convince otherwise.

    Fundamentally, the arguments against HS2 fail because there are many misconceptions as to how it's funded, where the money comes from, whether there's overlap with existing rail infrastructure or not, and fundamentally a big misconception on the over-arching case for decarbonisation through better transport, period. That's been at the heart of the HS2 project (and we are now seeing the first successful applications of low carbon concrete, for example). It's both a pioneer in this country and a necessary project, and yet so many people fail to grasp just how monumentally complicated and tied up the whole thing is.

    The pre-covid rail trends in passenger numbers across the country haven't recovered as yet, but it is coming. HS2 is about building a more complex series of high speed rail lines over an even longer period of time and effectively future proofing our existing rail systems when big overhauls in the existing infrastructure between the major cities is required.

    The business case for HS2 was, and remains, a capacity argument and the argument against building HS2 is always portrayed as a simple "upgrade X or Y mainline instead" without understanding the disruption to the existing network that even perceived minor infrastructure upgrades entail (e.g. new overhead lines).
     
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  11. 35B

    35B Nat Pres stalwart

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    I agree with most of your argument there.

    The bit I'm not comfortable about is the exposition of why transferring funding between projects is difficult. I work within a projects environment, and I see all of those processes; I also work for a supplier so see it happen twice - once for the customer's processes, and once as we work out how to propose. But ultimately, those are just processes that have been implemented to try to ensure deliverability and value for money. It remains perfectly possible (see the recent Ministerial Direction re. Rwanda) for those changes to happen at the stroke of a pen, and render all that careful work irrelevant. It is very easy within a project environment to take those controls as a given, and lose sight of the reality that they are just means to an end. I can think of a few times in my career where a decision about a project has broken the bounds of those decision making processes, and those processes have then become part of the sweeping up afterwards, not the decision itself. We delude ourselves to think that HS2 or resignalling in Anglia are immune from that possibility, however wastefully wrongheaded we might consider it to be.
     
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