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[Dishevelled Den]

The bloke's a legend, there would have been no Hitman and Her if it wasn't for Pete

I always fancied 'her'.

Micheala can be found on countryfile on Sunday's - still looking pretty good as well

http://veggieadvisor.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/07/Michaela-Strachan.jpg

That's the girl Phil You've made a decrepit, crusty old gett very happy.

[tunnie]

It wont benefit Oxford and shouldn't either.

For me, a high speed link is only of use if it serves cities that are a reasonable distance apart hence I guess London, Birmingham, Manchester, Newcastle and maybe a tunnel to the independent state of Scotland  makes some sense.

Clearly we do need to do some pretty major work on the rail network and the idiots who say upgrade what we have got are missing the MASSIVE challenge that means.

The failed West Coast upgrade shows just that!

One interesting side cut from this, as it got me interested is the Crossrail interchange for HS2 & Heathrow link, puts it at Old Oak Common, which is the old Eurostar service point + First Great Westerns traction maintenance yard.

If this gets build, Great Western line will be a bit stuffed, as they will have no maintenance facilities east of Reading.

The maintenance facilites are no issue, they have plenty of time to address that and Old Oak Common is not in a great position anyway as its almost unaccessable during the day due to the lack of paths on the mega busy network around it

The West coast work was very succesful and the upgrade we need would make that job look like a minor makeover as the fundamental challenge in the UK is the huge loading gauge limitiation. To fix that requires new bridges, tunnels everything....hence cheaper to build a new line and much less disruptive.

The work does not appear to have translated into results though, know quite a few people still stay reliability on that line is very poor! No better than before 

[Marks DTM Calib]

Reliabilty was not part of the requirement, the key thing was supporting a larger number of paths to run more trains and that it has done well.

The major challenge they have is rolling stock and the dreaded bottleneck that is Birminham New Street

[TheBoy]

Actualy, just checked on the Oxford to Manchester times and it would be quicker.

It takes 3 hours at the moment with one change.

With HS2 (as, when and if it goes to Manchester!) it would be a 1 hour journey to Birmingham International plus the 45 minutes to Manchester and say a 15 minute change time so 1 hour less.

HS2 isn't stopping at Birmingham Intl, so train in to Snow Hill, Walk to Curzon.

Remember the official blurb on this, provided by Network Rail and HS2 Ltd (who are closely intertwined) is mostly bias in favour of it. To the point of outright lies/contradictions.

And lets no forget, the extra 14m tunnels have had no impact on cost, surely that shows that the cost is a random(ish) figure.  In fact, the cost hasn't changed in 2 years - even before a route was even agreed . 

[TheBoy]

If capacity is the big gain, would the overcrowded paddington-bristol line have been a better target?

Chiltern and MK nlines dont suffer too bad