Talk Morgan Forums Community The Malvern Arms How about cancelling HS2

This might polarise things a bit more:

https://www.railtech.com/all/2023/10/23/british-high-speed-rail-project-hs2-accused-of-huge-fraud/

No big surprise at all, I suspect there is more to this given the rabid enthusiasm by Westminster for a project with no justification.

Nationalise public transport and give it to people who know what they are doing.

That is the important bit Bob! And potentially the most difficult
I have attempted, some time ago, to read a book titled "I tried to run a railway" by G.F. Fiennes. I reached Chapter 4, but I'm afraid it is one of the very few books that has beaten me.

It would be very interesting to have a comparative panel of ex-industry experts/specialists review the current system and offer short and long terms options.

Add some geeks from venture capital firms to them in order to work out where you could harvest money for investment from the program, or leverage technology to reduce costs in a generational manner.

Access to land, right of way revising property use must all be options? Look at it more like a business that also runs trains to the highest degree but maximumse the options for generating capital to re-invest.

Get rid of the profit motive.

Nothing new in this HS2 process of securing Government support for a capital project, basically the early estimates are not in depth enough to reveal the true costs of the project and secondly there is an incentive to have a low cost project to promote and engender Government buy in and support. Once you have the financial support, then inevitably the costs rise in part due to scope creep and greater in depth understanding of the true cost....simple things like doubling (over the original estimate) the cleared area for the train to operate along has a massive impact and should have been recognised at the outset.

Seen it on a much lower scale in other government projects especially IT. You cant imagine the cost of re-platforming from ICL to IBM platforms the Government has been undertaking over the last 20 years or so, it staggers belief and still they build software for government applications in silo's so separate standalone systems and data bases for each Government department ie HMRC, NHS, DWP and so on and within departments so JSA, is separate to Pensions, each with their own database even though they will have common data eg name, address, DOB etc .. Each separate database has different validation criteria eg Pensions validates DOB and NI Number as that is a critical part of the payment criteria of pensions, JSA will also have a DOB but its not verified and could be different to the Pensions system record. Very few records are shared and common as different reliance is placed on the data according to the legislation framework. It has been improving with the introduction of what became to be known as ' pipe and triggers'...where data or an event was shared between silo's. That 's why in the past many government forms eg UB40 asked the claimant what other benefits they were receiving as the government department paying unemployment benefit did not always know. Universal Credit is now linking all benefit payments, but probably still doesn't talk to the HMRC personal records for that individual.

At least the Driving Licence data can be shared with the Passport Office Data so renewing either document has become fast and efficient.

The HS2 money should have been spent on improving what's already there. I've travelled thousands of miles by train, and on major routes, the land is there already to allow quadrupling of tracks because it was like that before. OK there are a few urban bottlenecks such as North out of Leeds, and North out of Sheffield, both on urban double track viaducts, with Sheffield initially in a deep stone lined cutting, but to solve such minor issues would have cost a lot less than HS2.

Politicians like to think they are educated people. Sadly on specialised projects you need geek knowledge to be project effective and cost effective, and with a level of integrity which precludes back handers and mates deals. That's mission impossible. The IT contracts which I saw first hand in the Civil Service were a disgrace. Individuals who couldn't do the job migrated into IT and then called the shots..............

If they want to see a good example they need to see what South Korea has done. It is very very impressive. Samsung Data have an integrated government platform triggered by your ID card. It does driving licence, passport, tax and dozens of other things.

The only possible benefit of all this dis-integration between projects might be that if they are hacked then it might "only" get a sub-set of our worldy data. God save us. It's a tiny win in a big dirty pond of waste and risk.

I remember standing in line in SFO car rental one day and a South Korean was explaining to the Hertz person that he did not have a passport as this was his ID card. It was his passport. The Hertz person then just kept repeating "no not your driving licence, your passport" as it is credit card sized. What a wonderful assumptive world we live in eh?

The real driver for maintaining the "silo" approach is to protect the legions of IT people and consultants supporting the silos. Jobs for the modern day "Jobsworths".

HS2 should have taken the Great Central Line out of London from Marylebone to Sheffield and Manchester.
Built as 4 track high speed route and to a European Loading gauge it would have been perfect for High Speed Trains. The line avoided Birmingham....and using it would rather destroy the GCR Heritage line. An acceptable loss, in my view!