Playing with trains/ HS2 & 3

[Flosshilde]

A second class day return tomorrow from Manchester to London is £296

Depends on what time you travel - I've just looked & if you leave Manchester at 9.35am & London at 7.00pm you can do it for about £75. If you are over 60 you can use a railcard & get a third off, bringing it down to £50

[Flosshilde]

Fine - but it's all much less if you fly!

I'm not against train travel - far from it, indeed, I'm all for it - but when the prices compare to air travel so badly, the "choice" is obvious, unless one can afford to regard train travel as a luxury that's nevertheless within one's budget...

One of the reasons that air travel is so much less is because aviation fuel isn't taxed. Airports are also not built or maintained by the airlines (although the latter do have to pay to use them), & planes travel through the air, which doesn't have to be built or maintained. There is also the question of the massive amount of pollution produced by planes.

Given that the airports are usually well outside city centres, entailing and expensive taxi, or a train journey, to get to them, and checking in & hanging round takes more time than the actual flight, & the actual planes are so uncomfortable, then I think the train wins hands down, even if the fares are a bit higher.

[gurnemanz]

We spent a week in Cologne over New Year and would have preferred to go by rail having taken this option once before, but when we tried to book at the end of November Eurostar to Brussels was sold out on the dates we wanted. We had no difficulty getting a flight, albeit from Stansted - our least convenient London airport but with the cheapest flights.

[MrGongGong]

Stansted - our least convenient London airport

Why is Stansted described as a "London" airport ?
as is Luton

they really aren't anywhere near London at all

you should have gone from London Manchester

[ahinton]

One of the reasons that air travel is so much less is because aviation fuel isn't taxed. Airports are also not built or maintained by the airlines (although the latter do have to pay to use them), & planes travel through the air, which doesn't have to be built or maintained. There is also the question of the massive amount of pollution produced by planes.

I did admit earlier that they are not environmentally freidly at present but that this could change, given the will and the research.

Given that the airports are usually well outside city centres, entailing and expensive taxi, or a train journey, to get to them, and checking in & hanging round takes more time than the actual flight, & the actual planes are so uncomfortable, then I think the train wins hands down, even if the fares are a bit higher.

The accessibility depends upon where the traveller is in the first place! One has to get to the train station or airport by some means. As I indicated, whilst checking in and hanging around does indeed take a lot longer than is the case with train travel, my example of Bristol to Glasgow and back still leaves the plane journey taking far less time overall than the train journey; the longer the journey, the greater that difference in favour of the plane, particularly as we have only slow trains in Britain. It's somewhat different in France; one can do Paris to Bordeaux by train in 3 hours (so why fly?), but there's no way that one could do that from London to Penzance, which is around the same distance.

[ahinton]

Why is Stansted described as a "London" airport ?
as is Luton

they really aren't anywhere near London at all

you should have gone from London Manchester

That one's already been raised in conjunction with the then proposed HS2 project, in references (of what intended seriousness I know not) to "London Birmingham airport".

That said, had the post-WWII plans to build an airport for Bristol in the Filton area actually gone ahead (which they couldn't today, as many tens of thousands of homes and businesses have been built there since), we'd almost cetainly have been talking by now about "London Bristol International", given that it would be slap in the centre of the M4/M5 corridor with the nearby M32 into Bristol and M48 and M49 providing links to south Wales and, in addition, it would be in the middle of where the main train line from London to south Wales crosses the one from south west England to the north of England and Scotland; I imagine that, by now, it would be Europe's largest and busiest airport and, had the most ambitious of the once proposed Severn Barrage projects also gone ahead, it might by now have grown to the point at which Bristol, Cardiff, Newport, Gloucester, Cheltenham and Bath would all have merged into a single city to rival London in size.

[Flosshilde]

That said, had the post-WWII plans to build an airport for Bristol in the Filton area actually gone ahead ... I imagine that, by now, it would be Europe's largest and busiest airport and, had the most ambitious of the once proposed Severn Barrage projects also gone ahead, it might by now have grown to the point at which Bristol, Cardiff, Newport, Gloucester, Cheltenham and Bath would all have merged into a single city to rival London in size.

& then there would have been development along the M4 & London & the Bristol etc supercity would have merged into one, swallowing up most of the South of England!!

[Flosshilde]

particularly as we have only slow trains in Britain.

Which the HS2 will go (a short way) to remedy. & which you are arguing against. Some disagreement, surely?

[Simon B]

I imagine that, by now, it would be Europe's largest and busiest airport and, had the most ambitious of the once proposed Severn Barrage projects also gone ahead, it might by now have grown to the point at which Bristol, Cardiff, Newport, Gloucester, Cheltenham and Bath would all have merged into a single city to rival London in size.

In which case, praise be to Almighty Zarquon that this didn't happen then! Cardiff and Newport have already almost merged at the edges (to form Carport, I like to think) but it's still relatively civilised round those parts otherwise...

Not quite so off-topic, re the impact of fuel cost on trains - it's minimal. I read somewhere that the recently MTU re-engined trains formerly known as InterCity125 that WorstGreatWestern use to ferry people (sometimes even on time) between Cardiff/Swansea/Bristol/Penzance do about 8 mpg. That's very minimal fuel cost when compared with cars and buses - £175 in derv to go Bristol->London->Bristol on trains with capacity in the ~400+ area - i.e. basically nothing per passenger. The cost is massively dominated by infrastructure and staff.

Meanwhile, aviation guzzles fuel on a per-passenger basis whilst requiring relatively little infrastructure apart from the tubes-of-death themselves (I'm not a fan). The lack of taxation on aviation fuel equals a hefty subsidy.

Much of the debate around HS2 (which I'm not particularly convinced by) has centred around the relative futility of knocking 15 minutes off London-Birmingham. This is fair enough. Even taking account of the knock-on effect on longer journeys, the proposed extensions to Manchester/Leeds and later hopefully Glasgow etc it still looks like a lot of investment for dubious return.

However, the real issue that has been mostly ignored in the public debate (and strikes me as an epic fail on the part of the HS2 propaganda machine) is capacity. Never mind the journey time - though speed and capacity are inescapably linked. The root problem is the WCML is already almost out of capacity, and it's technically implausible to increase it much further. How else do Virgin get away with charging silly £300 fares to Manc and still have rammed trains much of the time?

Has anyone ever tried driving up the M1/M6 to Manchester on a Friday afternoon? If there was an extension to the Bakerloo line to Manchester Piccadilly with the standard 1970s stock limited to about 35mph stopping at every blade of grass it'd get there faster. A lot faster in fact. It's a 190-mile traffic jam. The corresponding trains mostly move, but with passengers not so much accommodated as flattened against the vestibule walls. Biiiig capacity problem.

Something needs to be done, else this corridor will end up (not that it isn't already) as a large-scale version of the current utter mayhem caused by the great Hammersmith Flyover cockup.

[gurnemanz]

Why is Stansted described as a "London" airport ?
as is Luton

they really aren't anywhere near London at all

you should have gone from London Manchester

Point taken...We live in Wiltshire and have many airport options - none of which is convenient. London/Bristol airport is actually in Somerset, ie the wrong side from our point of view. Last time I went there, an automatic barrier charged me £1 just to drop someone off. London/Birmingham is OK but not near and there is no motorway link (Fosse Way, built by the Romans, is the best route). If we want to go to Leipzig (my wife's home town) Stansted Ryanair is the only option.

[MrGongGong]

Point taken...We live in Wiltshire and have many airport options - none of which is convenient. London/Bristol airport is actually in Somerset, ie the wrong side from our point of view. Last time I went there, an automatic barrier charged me £1 just to drop someone off. London/Birmingham is OK but not near and there is no motorway link (Fosse Way, built by the Romans, is the best route). If we want to go to Leipzig (my wife's home town) Stansted Ryanair is the only option.

London Stornaway is a nice quiet option !

[Flosshilde]

I did admit earlier that they are not environmentally freidly at present but that this could change, given the will and the research

I notice that you don't address my points about the low costs that airlines have to bear - eg no taxation on fuel, no infrastructure, etc. - in comparison to rail.

[ahinton]

& then there would have been development along the M4 & London & the Bristol etc supercity would have merged into one, swallowing up most of the South of England!!

Well, eventually, yes - and that's already happening anyway, slowly - but such a result would still be quite some way off, methinks!

[ahinton]

Which the HS2 will go (a short way) to remedy. & which you are arguing against. Some disagreement, surely?

Not at all. The extent to which it would "remedy" this (and do bear in mind that my view is heavily dependent upon the fact that HS2's already ancient technology as far as speed is concerned) is so vanishingly small that I can perceive no justification for the massive investment involved, especially since it won't even be operational until the next decade, by which time things will have moved on so far beyond it again that it will look like the futile exercise that it will by then have been revealed to be.

[ahinton]

I notice that you don't address my points about the low costs that airlines have to bear - eg no taxation on fuel, no infrastructure, etc. - in comparison to rail.

But how much tax do the rail operators have to pay on the diesel that most if not all non-electrified trains incur? Simon B's post above tells us something about this. The fact remains that, if all subsidies on taxation on fuel were to be withdrawn from all public transport operators, whether they run coaches, planes or trains, even greater numbers of those middle- and lower-income people would be unable to afford to use public transport to get to work.

Ultimately, though, if one were to look at a currently mythical situation in which all of these modes of transport ran on sustainable alternative energy sources and consequently didn't any longer even need fuel subsidies, how different would the situation really be from what it is now for the consumer? Not so very much, I suspect. The trains would still be much slower than the planes and the coaches would be slower still and subject to running among other traffic over which they'd have no control.