HS2 is amazing, as you can tell if you go and look at it.
This is the Colne Valley Viaduct, a two mile concreteswoosh on the western edge of London. Specifically it's the point where fast trains to Birmingham will cross the Grand Union Canal, close to Harefield Marina, during a rare burst above ground on the approach to the Chilterns. To get here I took the bus to The River Garden pub and walked down the towpath past 26 moored narrowboats and a tabby cat stalking a moorhen. The viaduct curved majestically through the silence, its geometric arches briefly spanning the cut before fading into the fog above a gravelly lake. I was hugely impressed by the architecture and the civil engineering triumph it represents, but not excited. Because, well, several reasons...
1) It's exceptionally slow
HS2 was officially proposed in 2009 and by the following year its route had been sketched across Ordnance Survey maps as far north as Crewe. We'll have it open by December 2026 they said, and for all sorts of complex political and engineering reasons they plainly haven't. Construction eventually began in 2020, the hope then being that trains might first run sometime between 2029 and 2033. Alas a more realistic recent reset has kicked that even further into the future, this despite massive downscaling and truncation, and the first services are now expected to operate "between May 2036 and October 2039". That's anything from 10 to 13 years away, and merely for trains between Old Oak Common to Birmingham Curzon Street.
The full scheme into Euston isn't expected to open until sometime between May 2040 and December 2043, that latter date still SEVENTEEN YEARS AWAY, and this for a project first conjured up SEVENTEEN YEARS AGO. That's a third of a century to build 140 miles of railway, and only if things go to plan which they never do so likely longer. Even Crossrail only took 18 years from Exchequer approval to first train, a gap which felt interminable, and this is far longer than that. How can they have built so much already...
...and yet be still over four thousand days from project completion?
2) I might never use it
Standing under the viaduct yesterday I wondered wistfully when I might finally get up there for a ride. Current best case scenario is late 2030s which for me would mean I'd be in my early 70s, which is just far enough into the future for me to wonder if I'll get that far. I'm not being morbid, just realistic, because there's a not insignificant chance I'll be in no fit state to take a train by then. I have similar feelings about the mooted Bakerloo line extension (estimated opening date 2040) and am considerably more pessimistic about Crossrail 2 (if the stars align, perhaps 2050). I'm thrilled for the rest of you who should get your chance to ride, but for me it's entered a grey area where I might not be around, or rather I've reached an age where long-term projects start to have completion dates that may not overlap with my consciousness.
Alternatively I might be more concerned with the project's mortality than my own. 2036 is at least two General Elections away and we might well end up with another government that seeks to throttle HS2 rather than complete it. Then there's a decade of wider world events to contend with, so again a significant but unquantifiable probability that a fast train linking London to Birmingham may no longer be a civilisational priority.
3) I might not want to use it
Crossrail has a myriad of purposes linking umpteen destinations, and even one-off visitors to London likely find themselves aboard at some point. HS2 will instead be a one-trick pony, initially at least, linking central Birmingham to off-centre London thus rather less useful. Who precisely will travel on HS2 has long been a moot point, indeed digital communication removed much of the need for business travel some time ago, though you'd hope a fast connection between the UK's two largest cities would always have a purpose.
A more important negative consideration might be the price of a ticket. It's far too early for HS2 fares to have been mooted, let alone decided, but I think we can agree they're not going to be cheap. An off-peak London to Birmingham return currently costs anything from £40 to £72 if bought on the day, the better price on the slower Chiltern line, and an HS2 ticket is sure to cost more. The only precedent we have is on HS1 to Kent where a train via the High Speed line costs maybe 20% more, suggesting at least a similar premium for reaching the Midlands via HS2. Those heading to Birmingham in 2036 might want to take HS2 for the speed but it'll always be far better value to go the slower way, prioritising saving money over saving time.
4) It's such a mess out there
You won't know if you've not been, but HS2's civil engineering works are exceptionally expansive and intrusive in scale. Take Euston, for example, where a 60 acre flattenedvoid exists to the northwest of the mainline station. Demolition of houses and businesses began in 2019 and yet it still looks like barely anything's been built since, this for the simple reason that plans for the ultimate form of Euston's HS2 station remain in flux. Take a double decker up Hampstead Road and the size of the void is simply astonishing, also likely unnecessarily large now they're only planning to add six platforms rather than 11. It's hard to get excited about a neighbourhood destroyed prematurely and as yet unreplaced, indeed greedily scandalous given no trains will depart its footprint before 2040.
Further out the landgrab is much larger, a vast scrape of mostly fields appropriated for construction along the line of the route. From the tunnel portal at West Ruislip the worksite extends almost two miles towards the Colne Valley Viaduct and in places is more than half a mile wide. Riding down Harvill Road aboard the U9 bus has long meant traversing a giant scar carved out of the landscape, now finally entering a remediation phase as huge amounts of soil are piled up instead on former agricultural land. One day everything'll be returned to a greener state, perhaps even nicer than before, but not before local residents, ramblers, dogwalkers and golfers and have had to put up with this extraordinary intrusion week in week out for the best part of a decade.
5) The view's going to be rubbish
One of the joys of train travel is the view out of the window, and you'd think an express whizz between London and Birmingham would offer a decent panorama. Alas not so. So much of the route has been placed in tunnels and cuttings for environmental mitigation, also behind eco-screening for noise reasons, that it's been estimated passengers will only experience “meaningful” views for nine minutes of the journey. It'll be like flying through cloud or zooming through the Channel Tunnel, inherently amazing but with no way of seeing where you are as all that carved-up countryside passes by unseen. If you hate it when Avanti or LNER stick you in a 'window seat' with no window, HS2's going to be like that for the vast majority of the journey.
6) It's a woefully castrated project
The original planners had such high hopes for HS2 as a fast link not just to Birmingham but to several northern cities. It'd finally connect the country, a project worthy of our Victorian forebears who built the existing choked network. Instead costs have spiralled and the project's scope has inexorably contracted, as planners fouled up and the political zeitgeist swung from firm commitment to chokehold. As things stand everything useful north of Birmingham has been extinguished in a wilful lack of vision and we're left with a single stunted track that's been overengineered for the rolling stock that'll eventually use it. Electoral timescales just aren't compatible with a project on this scale so here we are getting a suboptimal over-priced railway bypass to carry passenger traffic that may not eventually manifest, and all to create a bit of extra capacity that'll allow a few more trains to stop at Bletchley in 20 years time.
It's hard to get pumped up about a project that could have been so much more for so much less, and may arrive so late that I'll neither want to ride it nor be able to. It looks amazing, it will be amazing, but it's not a project I can get excited about.
