HS2 Going Ahead.

Bad news for everyone that has had their lives destroyed by this, lost their homes and businesses.

I work for a company that works in rail and one of our engineers will lose his house with HS2, on one hand he is happy for the work, but the other, the loss of the home. Compensation will apparently more than make up for it though and will be more than the house value. It is a ridiculous amount of money being spent on something which a lot of us won't live long enough to see completed entirely and there's not many people in the North that want to go to London anyway, no matter how quick the journey will be. The majority of the tracks past the Midlands aren't on the electrification upgrade yet either, so you can double the £120 billion spent already in that alone

All for better transport links, but seems an incredible amount of money to be spending, which I suspect is likely to increase considerably before completion .

it cost a ridiculous amount of money and when it will be ready it will be already old.

Oh dear 1 second its happening and the next it'snot.

I guess the old line has more meaning than normal .

" You get what you vote for "

I've heard the figure of £90 billion mentioned although typically it always ends up as more. When you work out there are about 30 million taxpayers in this country that is £3,000 from each taxpayer. It's a staggering amount of money and really its a vanity project for Boris which adds hugely to our debts. We need to be lowering costs in this country to enable more exports and if anything we need to run a cheaper train service to reduce the costs of our exports. Bulgaria buys in old re-conditioned coaches and trains and we should be doing the same. Running a state of the art train service requires a successful country that has money to waste on such vanity projects but we aren't that country, most of our industry is gone and we are borrowing huge amounts of money. I'm sure most of us realise most of our manufacturing is gone and most of the British brands of the past are no longer with us or now under foreign control. It just makes no sense to me at all. When you have huge crippling debts you don't go on a spending spree.

A huge percentage of people never use trains or use them less than 3 times a year and the ticket costs will be outrageous yet it will likely never be able to pay back that £90 billion investment what with high wages and maintaining the infrastructure of the service. Its quite likely it will be run at a loss and need ongoing topups from the government in addition to the £90 billion.

Transport seems to be in a revolutionary state at the moment with lots of new technologies hitting us including super high capacity batteries and much more efficient solar panels it just feels like this could be a white elephant and un-necessary.

We should prioritise returning to a trading surplus and paying back our huge debts and this doesn't help with either of those.

I might be in the opinion but when I was kid and I'm 46 now we had the M42 built right on the edge of our village .I 1st discovered the word NIMBY and its stuck with me ever since and I found it funny when the people complaining about it were then seen using the thing which they were complaining about .

Jump forward to today and I see the same arguements with HS2 which just makes me think of when I was a kid again . So if the government said on tv tomorrow they was scrapping HS2 and where the traintrack would be they was going to build a motorway instead then it will be met with howls of what about the environment . On January the 2nd the news is guaranteed each year that they interview rail passengers who are not happy with how much rail prices have increased by , whenever I catch the train to the football with the kids its standing room only .

To me HS2 is simply an extension of the trains with more trains and more carriages and if it rids us of overcrowding on the trains and improves the infrastructure of the rail network then as I said at the beginning I might be of the opinion of the minority but I have my opinion and I do respect other opinions as long as I can keep my opinion.

I would never believe the government when it gives estimates about projected costs as they have an abysmal track record on costs being doubled. This is on top of the fact that the country is almost on it's knees financially.

HS2 is just another lie. It was never going up north or they would have started north and headed south.