General   (General discussion, talk about anything.)

I agree with the notion that to spend billions and billions of pounds on a railway, which will shave half an hour off the present Manchester to London rail service is pointless, if someone needs to get from London, or Birmingham to Liverpool or Manchester quickly, they can fly there instead.

However

The other argument is that a new line would free up capacity on the existing rail network, which at present is very near to running at full capacity, so by the passenger trains using HS2, then the existing WCML could then carry more freight and local services, I am in favour of that, but I don't think that HS2 is the way to go (pun)

So as I have said before, why don't they reopen the most suitable railway lines which were closed during the era of the Beeching cuts in the 1960s, because in many cases the original track beds are still there, and the emphasis would be to put the freight and local services back on to those newly reopened lines, and free up capacity on the existing Intercity Network, which would be the the opposite of HS2

As regards HS3 the line from Liverpool to the East Coast, then something does need to be done about the existing cross Pennine routes, because they are slow and crap, so how about reopening and rejigging some of the old and existing railway lines, to give a frequent and fairly fast new service across the Pennines, there could be several routes available to do this.

So I am saying to the government is to use what you have already got in terms of the closed but still largely intact former rail network, surely those lines could be reopened for a fraction of the price of HS2 and to which it would serve the entire country, not just one track corridor, which is the existing WCML