Time for a national, publicly-owned, railway?

[Eine Alpensinfonie]

I was once asked by a Cockney cabbie if I knew where "Arijarba" was?

And now the Northern Powerhouse high-speed line is likely to be axed. But of course, new lines in London are much more important.

[Serial_Apologist]

And now the Northern Powerhouse high-speed line is likely to be axed. But of course, new lines in London are much more important.

HS2 now being........... too far down the line, of course.

The arguments against HS2 have been too well reiterated here and elsewhere, so I won't re-state them. The Northern Powerhouse, a conventional rather than high-speed project, would have been far more important had the "levelling up" notion had any substance to it, which one rightly doubts. A section of the national BBC TV news just now was devoted to the appalling levels of rail service now being offered to hapless travellers right across the North - the refusal of drivers to do overtime being treated as a pretext for cutting services. The new doctrine - or rather discredited old orthodoxy - blithely refuses to recognise the imperative to invest in infrastructure while everyone is forced to endure the unmitigated consequences of recession.