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So shall we take bets on how many times over the budget the final cost will be?
And how many years late it'll be?

Oh yes, let's have another high-speed rail link between Scotland and London before we even get one for the Westcountry. If this goes ahead it means we'll be in the ridiculous situation of being able to get to Scotland from London in less than half the time it takes a train to get from Paddington to Penzance.

It'll probably cost around about a small-ish Banking Crisis. No more than that!

Nevertheless, by 2090 people will be able to leave Birmingham as swiftly as they wish...

I was listening to a discussion in the radio last night. It was aabout a proposal by a right-leaning think tank that we should privatise the motorways and thus essentially turn them all into tool roads. The logic being that this would mean that instead of road-related revenue disappearing into the coffers of the exchequer, then to be handed on to irresponsible executives in the banking industry, road related revenue could be kept by the privatised company, then I assume to be handed on to irresponsible executives in the road building industry...

Anyway, as part of the discussion it was stated that, according to the government's own figures, total income from road-related taxes (VED, petrol duty, VAT on new cars and petrol, etc) was something like 45 BILLION pounds a year. Total road psoending is apparently something less than 8 billion pounds per year.

On other words it can be paid for in one year's taxes taken away from road users that isn't ordinarily plowed back into the transport system.

Jon

If they're building the entire thing from scratch and not using ANY existing lines then they should go down the (Inductrack System) MagLev route.

Why play catchup to the rest of Europe when we can surpass them?

Because that would require some innovation

And an absolute frakkin' fortune. The cost of MagLev trains per mile of track so very much more than ordinary electrified rails.

Let James May have a stab at it.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/devon/8219567.stm

I think you can already get up there in less time it used to take me to do Paddington -> Truro. There was talk of them electrifying the line down to Plymouth or Penzance which would be great. On the other hand Crossrail will mess up the routes from Paddington to Reading and onwards.

Edit: I'm not against this line and I think it's the way to go forward. The French did this years ago, why are we British so slow at these things?

Oh yes great, give the cornish a high speed link to London.

They already moan that their house prices are too high cos of all the tourists. Add a high speed rail link and it would be astronomical!!

Look on the bright side, they could bake the pasties and they'd still be hot in London. Well worth £30 billion I'd say.

Considering that we already have the 2nd highest house prices in the country after London, it can't get much worse.

If people would actually take the train to come here instead of clogging up the A30 and all the lovely B-roads I enjoy driving on, bring it on. The problem with getting down here is that the track isn't straight. If it was, the train could go as fast as it does past Swindon and Didcot on the way to London.

Either way £34bn could be spent a lot of ways. I'm not entirely convinced this is the best use for it.

Obviously this isn't going to get started within the next 10 years in less than 9 months there will be a tory government that will cut our buget for years to come so no high speed rail till we are out of debt and deficit.