This is an interesting article with the issues more nuanced than might be expected.
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There’s never been a joined-up logical way of looking at railways in the UK in my view.
From the outset, it has been about making money as opposed to providing a useful service to join communities and stimulate growth.
Until this changes, there are going to be dumb ass decisions like HS2.
I can’t help but think it would have been more useful to invest in the ECML and WCML- electrification and shit- as well as reopen lines such as BML2 and others.
The UK will always be held back by the mindset of the pioneering railway companies.
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The article does suggest that the original design brief was misguided. It didn’t need to be the fastest service anywhere with all the hoop jumping that’d involve and it was always going to be too short to have a significant environmental impact. It appears to have become the wrong answer to a valid question.
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HS2 could only make any kind of sense if it was the full-fat, full-monty, complete maxxed-out scheme, which will now clearly never happen. It’s sucked-up funds that would have been much better spent maintaining and improving infrastructure nationwide - the lack of that has driven so much freight off the rails since it started that that alone negates HS2’s environmental benefits many times over.
Agree with all of Stu’s points, too. The roots of our railways sprang not from logically developing a national travel infrastructure, but from multiple competing companies - many tiny and wholly hopeless - all fighting like cats in a bag to reach profitable locations ahead - or often alongside - one-another. The whole thing was invariably warped horribly out of shape anywhere where influence could either expensively-divert lines away from powerful landowners’ property - or equally, when MPs and wealthy constituents could afford to have lines come to towns, villages, hamlets and even private houses for which no sane business case could ever have been made. A mix of parochial squeamishness (Victorian NIMBYism) and cheapskatery further hampered things by often causing stations to be built well away from the centres of population they were supposed to serve… MANY such cases…
After that, two World wars, and more damagingly, political dogma continued to cripple the system. Ernest Marples and his axeman, Beeching, did huge harm. Marples was hugely corrupt (ended-up fleeing the country), and had vested interests in seeing motorways built, but some of what was cut nonetheless made sense - in 1953… Almost no-one saw the traffic-choked and polluted hellhole that Britain 2025 would become, nor the migration of jobs to the cities to the extent that has taken place and the commensurate rise in huge commutes from far-afield.
Nothing useful has been learned by subsequent governments - Labour dogmatically and clumsily nationalises (with which I broadly agree, the service is too valuable to wider society to be allowed to die), and the Tories dogmatically sell-off all the stuff that had a chance of making any profit to overseas pension funds - to whom they paid as-big or bigger subsidies than the costs of national ownership because they were held to ransom by the new owners…! And round the cycle repeats, with, as usual, the ordinary person always paying the price - in all senses…
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Word.
The railways, like the rest of the country are royally fucked, quite simply due to rampant, unfettered, mindless, government sponsored capitalism and that ain’t going away anytime soon.
Cunts, all of them, to a man. CUNTS !!!
BTW: Did I mention, CUUUUNNNTTTTSSS !!!
ALL OF THEM !!!
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Case in point:
People willingly paid money to spend over 6 hours on these hateful tin cans. 6 minutes would still be too long…
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I found being permanently drunk made them more tolerable, tho’ I was amazed to discover they were still in service - like some long-forgotten actor who turns 100 twenty years after you’d assumed he was dead…
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This image of two Gresley A4 locos* undergoing servicing at Darlington in the 1960s kinda makes me wonder if H.R. Giger was a train spotter…
*same class as steam speed record holder, ‘Mallard’.
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I completely get the Necronomicon analogy.
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More in the uncanny line - when this image bobbed-up in my feed, I assumed it was AI slop:
…but no, American engineering ingenuity, ca 1849, resulted in one Isaac Dripps producing this very masterpiece - which proved to be every bit as comically useless as its ungainly appearance suggests.
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Would be perfik for a restoration seaside novelty railway like we have along the Nth Norfuk coast - it already has a ferris wheel and beach hut! 
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Bambies; Swallows and Executives:
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Posting this, not so much for the sexy Diagram 1581 (rerated) unfitted ‘Pillbox’ brakevan - tho’ that is 
- but very much more for the 1960s’ gigantic middle-finger to health-&-safety that’s made my hoop tighten up just fucking looking at it…
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Always thought it strange the Southern Railway came up the tiny pillbox brake van and also produced the Queen Mary brake van which is massive.
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I love me a brakevan I do me
Funny things the QMs - actually more room inside a ‘Dancehall’, but they are magnificent beasts by any standard!
Got a trip to Frodingham booked for April - brakevan all to ourselves (club, Sam’s inexplicably uninterested) - can’t wait
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For the uninitiated. Presumably locomotives & their tenders incorporated braking systems to slow/stop themselves so were brakevans more to slow the progress of the freight being hauled? If so, what kind of brakes were used & how did the driver communicate with the brake van?
Good question! My guess would be a means of holding the rake whilst the locomotive is changed?
Have no idea though!