A rather sad day for Great Britain, the country that invented the railway, as Prime Minister Rishi Sunak cancels the second leg of the grand HS2 project.
Must admit, I never thought that a bullet train was entirely necessary to shave off 15 or 20 minutes from a journey between two cities already just a couple of hours apart. But, to be fair, getting business people between London and Manchester more quickly was not solely the initial idea. The plan was to free-up capacity, including freight, on existing overcrowded routes, rather as did the Birmingham Northern Relief Road (read ‘M6 Toll’) for the motorway network.
I used to travel up to the West Midlands every year for the Classic Car Show at Birmingham’s National Exhibition Centre, to flog our magazines. Much preferred taking the train as the car was a hassle. A cup of tea, a newspaper and magazine (pre-laptop days) – the train was always crowded but proved to be a restful way to travel.
Sadly, I think HS2 is yesterday’s solution to yesterday’s problem and, with costs spiralling towards £100 billion, no longer feasible in a Zoom-literate society. Train travel is down as people work from home. And can you imagine authorities allowing HS2 to travel at 220mph through the heart of Britain while councils everywhere are blanketing the countryside with 20mph speed limits?
The car still offers business travellers and commuters the best solution, although I wouldn’t want to test my range anxiety driving from London to Birmingham and back in an EV, and Manchester is an impossibility without an arduous recharge en route. Anyway, looking at the prices of electric cars, I remain stunned at how expensive they are. Ordinary EVs, not counting the Citroën Ami quadricycle, start around £30,000 and go up beyond £150,000. Looking a bit deeper into the whole EV gig, I see that if you fancy a very smart £130,000 Porsche Taycan company car, you get a big fat benefit-in-kind tax break. Ah, so that’s why there are so many sleek Taycans parked up in da ’hood.
So let’s take a mid-market EV such as a VW ID4. With a few extras and a home charger installed you are looking at a cost in the high-forties – for an electric Golf! With that imaginary sum in my back pocket, I cycled across to the nearest
