HS2 isn't about making journeys faster, it's about adding capacity. If you're building a new line, you may as well make it high speed; higher speeds mean more capacity since you can run trains closer together in time for a particular separation; and you require less machinery, staff and stabling space since each trainset can make more runs per day.

>if you're building a new line, you may as well make it high speed;

All things being equal, sure, but a high speed line is going to be more expensive, specially at the speeds required.

I'm not sure that any potential changes in working patterns given covid-19 will be taken into consideration but they should.

In any case, we'll no doubt fall into sunk cost fallacy territory soon and it will be £100Bn before this is done

>if you're building a new line, you may as well make it high speed;

I think the thing to understand here is that mixing speeds is awful for capacity. There are some fast trains now, and everything else has to be scheduled around them, which means they each eat up many slots, to clear the line a safe distance ahead. There's lots of demand for more slow trains, which can't be run.

If you built a new slow line, you would still have this problem. And the slow trains want to stop many places, so you can't build the line through open fields, and building through towns is really expensive.

So you build a new fast line. And then it may as well go a little faster than the existing fast trains. But this increment isn't the main point.

Or at least that's my understanding. I don't doubt the price will grow. I have also heard there may have been other not-quite-as-fast options, refurbishing a disused line instead?

>All things being equal, sure, but a high speed line is going to be more expensive, specially at the speeds required.

It's actually not that much more expensive...

Definitely agree — I suspect the (highly suspect) CBA that was used to justify HS2 would come out a lot less positive with the amount of extra home-working we can expect post-COVID-19.

Even if people work from home more, we will still want to shift freight from road to rail, and the WCML is full.

> nobody would be all that fussed to get to London 20 to 30 minutes quicker

I don't think people are that fussed. From QZ.com[0]:

"In the mornings, a train leaves London for Birmingham approximately every 15 minutes. The 7:23 am fast train leaves Euston and arrives at New Street station one hour and 22 minutes later, at 8:45 am—this would be shortened to 45 minutes with HS2.

The train is full of commuters and business travelers with a confusing range of opinions about HS2. Most point out that the journey from London to Birmingham is already quite fast. 'We have this train, so I question why we need it,' says Ben Brown, who commutes to Birmingham two to three times a week. 'It’s not as if the train that we’re in…is particularly slow,' echoes Damon Lacey, a human relations consultant from Portsmouth."

[0] https://qz.com/1803712/birmingham-shows-why-the-uks-hs2-plan...

Okay, now here's the next paragraph:

>Proponents of HS2 will point out ad nauseam that the point isn’t the journey time; it’s the increased capacity that a new railway will bring, allowing faster trains to shift on to their own track, and rendering the network more efficient. “We’ve been working off Victorian infrastructure on our national rail network and demand is increasing at an unprecedented scale, and we need more capacity,” explains Adam Tyndall, program director for transport at London First, a business advocacy group.

Yes it goes to Birmingham, but it's not for Birmingham. It just so happens that Birminghan is on the route to the North.

Birmingham will definitely benefit as it will mean that more local and regional trains can use the WCML when intercity trains move over to HS2.

> Birminghan is on the route to the North

It might be on HS2's route to the North, but it's certainly not on everyone's.

> Could this not be because of lack of said transport links on an East-West Axis?

The majority of the nation's key institutions are in London. How does improving an East-West axis improve access to them, or encourage them to move?

> I can't help but feel that if the trains had dedicated business carriages with reliable internet access

There are dedicated business carriages on London trains. The internet isn't fantastic but it's fine. But I'd rather not be on the train long enough to need it.

> The majority of the nation's key institutions are in London. How does improving an East-West axis improve access to them, or encourage them to move?

If transport links are good between Liverpool, Manchester, Sheffield, Leeds and maybe Hull then you have a significant pool of people available to work in any of those locations, though bigger pool is going to be Manchester, Sheffield and Leeds. This could encourage a move as the transport links to London are already pretty good.

> There are dedicated business carriages on London trains. The internet isn't fantastic but it's fine.

You might not have seen my edit, I didn't mean First Class. The internet access was, until 2018 when I was on the trains regularly, pretty, pretty bad, even in First class. Constant drops, issues sending emails, etc ...

> But I'd rather not be on the train long enough to need it.

It's not about need is about using the time productively. I could be on the train to London and use the close to two hours to catch up on emails and do a lot of admin. Essentially for me, it was the difference between attending a customer meeting in London, then spending the next day catching up and just having a normal day the day after the meeting.

One of my guys refused to work on the train as he would get motion sickness, so clearly YMMV

Could it not be that most institutions are in London _because_ of those good connections. The idea is to improve connects between different cities which will make it viable for companies to be located there.

This doesn't make any sense - for an institution to move from London to Leeds you don't need one line from Manchester to Leeds, you need a line from everywhere to Leeds.

That depends, there are multiple considerations:

One is access for "everyone". Many don't need that.

The other is access to a large enough labour pool.

That said, the easiest way for government to use government departments for district development policies, is to simply move them.

E.g. this is where the Norwegian equivalent of Companies House plus assorted similar registries is located:

https://www.google.com/maps/place/Br%C3%B8nn%C3%B8ysundregis...

If you zoom out you'll notice there are no major cities nearby.The nearest major city - Trondheim - is ~6h-7h drive South. It's smaller than Nottingham.

Norway has "just" relocated government departments out of Oslo as an intentional policy for decades, and it takes effort but it generally works quite well.

Transport policy then follows depending on how this changes transport patterns, rather than lead.

That depends on what institution is moving. Some just need a good link to Manchester, and so will be more willing to move. Some need to get everywhere and will wait. It depends on what the pros and cons of each city are.

As to if enough will move given any particular link, that is a hard question requiring complex studies and so cannot be answered.

Yep, and a good line from Liverpool and Manchester to Leeds would be a very good start. As then you good access to Leeds from many of the highly populated areas of the UK.