What is this being built by Milton Keynes Area?

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Unusual-Coconut-1939@reddit

HS2 is two things, a total waste of money and a contractors wet dream.

I work in construction on the commercial side of things, some of the rates we are getting for regular work are 4x, 6x what would normally be charged for the same work on any other project. It’s fantasy-land stuff. Unbelievable. Preposterous. I can completely understand why their cost to complete estimates have gone turbo.

It’s such a monster and so time constrained that they’ll literally pay anything just to get certain tasks done. I know people who have left corporate positions just to start their own business to become part of the supply chain just so they can get their slice.

I’ve been in scenarios where a small water main diversion which is usually say £300k in the normal world, is being quoted at £2.5m and final applications are in excess of that. Paid. No question. If there are questions, it’s from some retarded graduate QS who wouldn’t know the difference between a 50t excavator and BMW 3 series but talks like Alan Sugar.

Theft levels are also off the Richter scale.

It’s a complete mess. But then again, Crossrail was extremely similar. And for what, a stupid fucking railway. Laughable really, but people are making serious fucking coin from it. I should really whistleblow, but, I just can’t be fucked. The construction game is twisted, but it’s funny seeing the reports and interviews on the news and knowing the real story. It’s a blight on the landscape, the amount of land they have utterly destroyed is only part visible with photos like these.

I’m rambling, may do an AMA, would be a laugh but I’d be scared of the jail.

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sgt_stitch@reddit

Just imagine if all that money and effort was spent on training and paying a decent wage for an army of high quality state school teachers with all the equipment and facilities they need.

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f1madman@reddit

Check Google maps on satellite view you can see the scarring of the land fro space.

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No_Doughnut_3315@reddit

It has always felt like a project out of step with our time. Like its a piece of history to sit alongside Concorde. Seeing this image really hits home what a needless desecration of our green and pleasant land it is. We have train tracks already. Tickets are too expensive. I fail to see how HS2 addresses any of the needs of Britain in 2026. As far as vanity projects go, its fairly ugly.

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jizzyjugsjohnson@reddit

What a profoundly dim comment

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No_Doughnut_3315@reddit

Profoundly?

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jizzyjugsjohnson@reddit

Indeed

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Steenies@reddit

It's been sold to the people wrong I've discovered recently. It's not so someone can travel to Birmingham in ten minutes from London. It's so the capacity is freed up to allow for people and freight to travel around. Supposedly massive amounts of goods will be taken off roads because of it.

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towerridge@reddit

Not sure how anyone can fail to see it, but here’s the connection for you. The current tracks are full, therefore tickets are high. This adds more tracks, and it’s not for vanity or beauty.

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better_life360@reddit

A massive financial mistake

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Alone-Movie4291@reddit

Roundabout?

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PepsiMaxSumo@reddit

HS2 - has to be as straight and as flat as possible hence the huge working area

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Exact-Action-6790@reddit

And people wonder why it cost so much

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PepsiMaxSumo@reddit

There’s a number of reasons it cost so much, but a big one is because when it was first approved it was designed to be in a best in class high speed rail (for our terrain). Could’ve made it 10% slower and saved billions.

Should’ve dropped that requirement years ago, and when it finally has got built there’s newer tech that’s even faster anyway.

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Wanallo221@reddit

At work we went to some of the technical consultations for HS2. Part of the reason why it was designed like this was future proofing.

Apparently, the route is technically Mag-Lev compatible.

Personally I think that future proofing like that is 100% worth it.

What wasn’t worth it was them not securing the route and placing buy options on the land before announcing the route. People artificially raising the value of their land knowing it was being compulsory purchased cost us billions alone.

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audigex@reddit

Apparently, the route is technically Mag-Lev compatible.

I've heard this a few times but can't find anything to support it other than the fact HS2 happens to be grade separated (as any modern railway line would be) and has large curve radii

I can't find a single piece of evidence that this is anything other than coincidental to the fact that high speed rail also needs those things, or to suggest that anything was done differently to accommodate a conversion to maglev

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audigex@reddit

Could’ve made it 10% slower and saved billions.

Is that actually true, though?

The figures I've seen previously suggest that running it at 125mph (so nearly half the speed, not just 10% slower) would only have been £1.4 billion cheaper, along with a general finding that it's not much cheaper to build conventional rail than high speed rail

Building new conventional rail lines would not be significantly cheaper than new high speed lines, nor would their impacts on the environment and communities be significantly lower than those of high speed rail, but they would deliver far fewer benefits in terms of enhanced connectivity and support for long term economic growth.

I believe the engineering estimate is that a brand new railway built to run at conventional speed, 125 mph, would be about 10% to 15% cheaper than a railway built to run at high speed, 250 mph, yet the benefits it would deliver would be reduced by about a third.

The actual reality seems to be that it's not actually much cheaper, because most of the cost comes from buying the land and materials, and the labour to construct it to modern safety standards etc

The extra cost to make it run fast just means straightening out a few curves, which adds minimal extra cost when you're planning an entire route from scratch - you end up buying different parcels of land, but not inherently more land

Most of the wasted money actually comes down to tunnelling under rich folk between London and Birmingham, who didn't want to risk seeing the passing poor folk

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DaughterOfATiredMech@reddit

Typical England 😂

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Exact-Action-6790@reddit

I assume that speed dictated the straightness which then dictated the purchasing of more land that they couldn’t just building around?

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LUNATIC_LEMMING@reddit

it's a combo of the speed, the frequency of the trains, and the length of them.

we wanted, more, longer and faster. and it's meant something like 50% of the route needs to be bridges or tunnels. 1 less train an hour, 1 less carriage, 20kph less, and the price would have been half.

but because they sold it on speed not capacity, we're stuck with half a bloody railway.

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Dyon86@reddit

But but but it’ll get you there 5 minutes faster

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PepsiMaxSumo@reddit

Exactly, though it’s worse than you’ve thought - 1/3 of it is in a tunnel cause it had to be straight and local councils were denying the training going through their village or woodland etc

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Mr_Reaper__@reddit

Part of the reason the cost looks so high is that the price we hear is for everything; from rescue archeology digs along the route, digging up and moving 6+ feet of soil from ancient woodlands so the soil microbiome can be retained in the place they replant the forest, all of bridge and tunnel projects, all of the station construction, the trains themselves. Most countries would quote the cost of the ground works and the track laying as the "project cost" and all of the other costs are wrapped up in other projects that aren't included in the headlines. Yes it's an expensive project, but we are doing a lot with that money and when you include all the wrap around costs it's on par with other countries high speed rail projects and similar length motorway projects.

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