Treasures found on HS2 route
bbc.com
bbc.com
Excavation of tunnels and such should just come with a chance of finding artifacts, but it only materializes with the right culture tech unlocked (before some point, buried treasures were just scrapped or sold, not put into museums).
It’s happened often enough that it’s a wink and a nod that nothing was found. Foremen and anyone ‘in-charge’ will not be on site until any kind of digging is complete.
1. Surely the long term plan is to not keep these relics in a gargantuan warehouse but instead to put them in a museum(s) — with free entry no less — so that the tax paying public can enjoy them.
2. Further, collections of relics that relate to the site of each station on the line could be displayed in each.
The tax paying public aren't going to pay for that.
The existing collections can just about barely justify free entry. Most museums have a vast secondary collection that's not on display already. These items are going in a warehouse because there isn't enough money to do archaeology on them any time soon, let alone prep them for display.
For example, there's a bunch of swords 'on display' (such as it is) and then you can sort of just about see an entire sword storage/curation room off to one side, with many times more than are actually visible in some detail.
Highly recommended for people with an interest in vehicles, but there's a lot of other stuff from twentieth century consumer goods to the contents of Stephen Hawkings office on shelves there and document archives too.
That's certainly super optimistic of you.
Be kinda cool if they made wall mosaics at the respective stations out of them or something.
1. The permanent collections of just about all museums in the UK are free so if they go to a museum they will be free to see (after an initial exhibition if they were to host that)
2. This is not uncommon for things like Roman ruins in the UK. For example, near the Tower of London, there is a glass window in a random pedestrian underpass where you can see part of the original Roman wall around London, or in Cirencester and St Albans there are big parks where you can see all the Roman ruins. Where relics are smaller or more valuable, something like a railway station isn't really set up to keep them secure and on display so they would sometimes show casts or photographs of items, and have the original in an actual dedicated exhibition in a museum. For example if you go to Orkney you can see some viking relics in situ (eg the "viking grafitti" runes on the stones in maes howe) and some (like the scar boat burial) you need to go to an actual museum to see.
British NIMBYs seem unusually strong, even in a world of NIMBYism. Best wishes to the British in defeating the Midsomer Historical Society of Bat-Loving Cranks, which apparently controls the deep state over there.
Kind regards,
Nigel.
The issue is that the project has been so badly mismanaged and costs have spiralled so far out of control that even the first small, incomplete section of it is now costing us 3X what the ENTIRE project was supposed to cost. It’s also at least 7 years behind schedule: when they started construction, stage 1 was supposed to open in 2026 - this year!!
Yes, NIMBYism is part of this, but catastrophic project management failure and a culture where contractors view the public purse as an limitless cash cow to be milked to the maximum extent possible have a lot to do with it too.
Bottom line is the UK is not good at building large infrastructure projects, and the bigger they are, the worse it gets. Complete rethink/reboot required.
Also the short section that they are working on is by far the most expensive per kilometer compared to the northern parts. So the cost was always going to be pre-loaded in the early part.
Its also the case that this 3x number is not correct when you adjust for inflation. Covid and other stuff has increased because of inflation specially in that sector.
Another issue in the UK rail industry is simply that building and investing is so incredibly inconsistent that there isn't the pipeline for training people. And the constant political battle about HS2 also makes companies hesitant to do the needed investments.
But bottom line is this, unless you simply continue to work on HS2 and other infrastructure projects (like desperately needed electrification) you simply will never get better at infrastructure. And there are many things to learn and to get better at, on every level from parliament down to individual construction worker.
Unfortunately so far the 'reflection' that the UK has done on the issue with HS2 have been extremely disappointing and they have learned very little. But still even so, just by doing it the people and organization have gotten better and are moving increasingly faster.
Not doing the next parts of HS2 is hilariously stupid as the larger benefits only happen once the whole thing is complete. The UK has spend likely 50-60% of the total cost and only gets about 20% of the benefits.
Or, instead, keep building, so the UK actually gets experience with large scale projects? Establish an anti-corruption body that retrospectively investigates every pound spent on HS2, and places lifetime public-contract bans on contractors found to have acted dishonestly? If the graft is as extreme and obvious as you say, surely this is no hard task.
If the UK has no experience building things, there's only one way to get some, and it's not to stop building for ten years while the government 'rethinks and reboots' (i.e. pays McKinsey for expensive reports exculpating McKinsey for any cost overruns). Ten years during which all the people who were actually involved move on to other roles, often private sector, often overseas. That's how you throw away all the experience accrued during this construction.
Sometimes the perfect is the enemy of the good. In twenty years, when the HS2 is zipping around, bringing down the cost of logistics, making groceries cheaper, lowering house prices as people can live further out, no one will even remember how it was built.
If you happen to come across any part of HS2 in some random village you've never heard of it's quite incredible the impact it's having on the locals. Locals who live miles away from the nearest station and therefore unable to use the line, by the way.
We also have very little wildlife left and we don't really want to live in concrete jungles.
Suffice to say, it's not difficult to see why it's like this in the UK if you actually come and see.
Because people inherently misunderstand the benefit of HS2, and how could they not if it's constantly being misrepresented by our media and politicians.
UK has one of the highest proportion of freight transported by road in Europe. That is fundamentally because our rail infrastructure is overloaded and unable to take any more freight. All non-perishable stuff that in other countries just goes on rail, in the UK is moved by trucks on our roads. Which as you can imagine, is causing tens of billions of pounds worth of damage to our roads, which we - taxpayers - pay for. All of these locals that live miles away from the train station are already affected by the lack of rail infrastructure - because every time they drive somewhere they have to contend with massive potholes and insane amount of heavy cargo traffic anywhere they go. If HS2 is ever finished, it will reduce congestion and our roads and reduce the wear and tear which again, is costing us billions in upkeep every year.
But according to our media, it's all about saving london commuters 2 minutes on a train from Birmingham, so every Dick and Harry is against it, because like you said - they live miles from the nearest station, why would they care?
If we wanted to address the freight situation it would be along the route of the A428/A14 from Folkstone (where much of the freight is landed) to the Midlands. That road already has a cheery sign on it pointing out how high the accident rate is.
It would of perhaps been an easier sell if we could of built it much closer to the WCML and told people, look this is to get rid of those horrible fast trains that wizz though your local station at 125mph.We'll use the space for more services so your commute to London from say Leighton buzzard is faster and less busy.
Knocking down half the towns that the WCML runs through to build more tracks carrying trains that aren't going to stop there would be neither easier nor cheaper than HS2.
You analysis is very narrow and only considered the benefits to a certain set of people.
HS2 actually follows reasonably closely to the old GCML. And for the same reason, its the best route to build a fast rail-line along.
I think your proposal complete ignores the additional cost of such a route change. And the cost alone, aside from anything else would make it unreasonable.
Many things go into selecting a route and in most cases where I think they made the wrong choice its usually because of cost concerns, like not building the needed tunnels into cities.
The reason HS2 route cost so much money is because so much is tunneled. Why is so much tunnelled? Because rich people live there and won't accept a blot on the landscape, partially because they don't see a personal benefit.
If you can remove the tunnels it doesn't really matter that the route is slightly longer or has slowly less optimal geometry.
And you don't get magically rid of all issues with people complaining, because guess what, other people live on that other imaginary route that lives in your head, and they would demand tunnels too.
And its really the politicians fault, a few people who don't like the look of the train should not have the power to stop it, specially not in a place as centralized as England.
The whole way HS2 is designed is to maximally reduce the amount of fast trains going north south on the existing network. Leading to a massive capacity upgrade on the existing lines. You can still run some express lines but likely much more lines that stop at more station, making it fast for you to go to next HS2 stop and from there to the further distance destination.
HS2 connection to Leeds was designed to help the ECML, the whole HS2 system was designed by experts to help with WCML and ECML.
Of course now that the former car brained fucking moron of a prime minister in his last attempt to safe himself canceled most of HS2 all those benefits are gone. And labor is to cowardly and ignorant to bring it back.
Building more and more infrastructure is not sustainable. It's been shown time and time again that more infrastructure only leads to more usage of said infrastructure. The number of lorries on the road will not decrease, we'll just start carting around even more stuff than before.
> because every time they drive somewhere they have to contend with massive potholes and insane amount of heavy cargo traffic anywhere they go
I don't buy that. The potholes are in residential and country roads. No amount of railways is going to do anything about that. The cargo traffic which could go via rail is on the motorways.
I'm all for more rail and less roads. But to stop the road usage we need to tax it more heavily, especially for heavier vehicles, and not just lorries. So far I haven't seen any evidence of replacing roads with rail, it's just more, more, more.
The only way to reduce consumption is people getting poorer or people increasing their savings. And that's just future consumption.
Building more and more infrastructure is actually sustainable. And arguably we are not even building more and more as things like rail infrastructure is less now then it was in many places.
> It's been shown time and time again that more infrastructure only leads to more usage of said infrastructure.
And that is actually good if the infrastructure usage does not have massive negative externalizes, like ... trains. It actually reduces externalizes because it takes away from car and air traffic.
> The number of lorries on the road will not decrease, we'll just start carting around even more stuff than before.
Switzerland is prove that you can reduce the amount of lorries. But even if you don't, it will at least reduce the growth. And it makes it so you don't have to invest in highway expansion.
You might be against that anyway, but most people would demand it if existing highways are always full of lorries.
> But to stop the road usage we need to tax it more heavily, especially for heavier vehicles, and not just lorries. So far I haven't seen any evidence of replacing roads with rail, it's just more, more, more.
If you tax heavy transport without providing an alternative you simply drive up cost of living and make peoples live worse.
But you are right, taxing lorries and putting that into a fund that helps rail expansion is exactly what Switzerland did.
(it's very British to say "this is too good, can we have something cheap and nasty instead please?")
Quite a lot of the cost is the NIMBY appeasement mentioned upthread. Something like a quarter of the line will be in tunnels. Making a slower line wouldn't make that any cheaper.
The extension to Euston was supposed to have 11 platforms. Even the reduced scope now being implemented is 6 platforms, I believe. All 11 were required to handle the eastern leg of HS2 [providing bypass capacity for the East Coast Main Line out of King's Cross and the Midland Main Line out of St Pancras], and services to Scotland and Manchester [bypassing the West Coast Main Line from Euston's classic platforms].
> If they'd put in another standard rail line instead
That would be crazy. In order to be a viable line to go from Midlands to London and reduce capacity, it would have to be at the very, very minimum as fast as that line goes today. So you are going to build a high-speed line of some sort anyway.
And that means maybe you can be a bit more adaptive to the terrain, but that also leads to more distance and thus more kilometers of line that has to be build.
A huge amount of the cost is simply buying the land, building the tunnels and bridges, putting up the electricity wires and so on. All that you would have to do anyway.
So basically at the very minimum you would need to build a 200km/h line, and nobody serious would even consider that. A 250km/h is the only reasonable 'lets safe money choice'. Going to a 300-350km/h line is going to be more expensive, but likely only by a few %, maybe 10%. But you would lose a huge amount of the benefit, as tons of study show time is a massive important to use.
So if you actually take into account future income from the line, building it to a lower standard would have been insanely stupid.
> taken up much less space
This is just straight up factually wrong. If you want to save money by changing alignment, you need more space, not less.
> would have been much cheaper
As I pointed out, much is simply wrong here.
> would have caused less disruption
Building would have more disruption and overall there would be more disruption in general.
> would have had a clearer business case
The business case, would be much much worse.
The people making that argument somehow think that you could build some rural 160km/h rail line and still get 90% of the benefit. Yet somehow no country who analysis this beliefs this and pretty much every single rail expert in the world doesn't agree with it either.
So the question you have to ask yourself do you want to believe the designer of HS2, most experts in rail technology or a bunch of anti-infrastructure activists?
HS2 benefits pretty my everyone along it’s route path through increases local services as capacity is released from the current lines
Midland Connect have a good overview of what it enables them to do – https://www.midlandsconnect.uk/media/1602/hs2-released-capac...
There’s also a document somewhere that covers how HS2 increases short distance services from Euston somewhere
Local rail transport should benefit hugely from HS2
In most places it barley effects people at all and when it does 99% of the time its a minimal visual impact.
> therefore unable to use the line, by the way.
This is a complete misunderstanding on the system effects of these lines. The point is that all other train lines can be used much more efficiently because the high-speed trains don't have to use those lines anymore. Making it much easier to run more rural trains.
And it will also reduce car use on these routes, meaning the much, much worse highways will be used less.
So in actual fact, the new lines are massively positive in terms of overall impact for rural areas.
And I say this living in a country with some of the most dense rail networks in the world.
> We also have very little wildlife left and we don't really want to live in concrete jungles.
Another bunch of nonsense. Rail lines are very small and highly efficient. If you didn't build rail lines, you would almost certainty have to extend highways and those are infinity worse for wildlife.
Railways and specially high-speed rail have the best impact vs effect calculation of almost anything you can build.
"People like you" shows that you're no better than the "NIMBYs" you so hate. Just complete refusal to accept that anyone might be different from you or have problems that aren't yours.
It was never about "building infrastructure", though, which is why they used Compulsory Purchase to force farmers to sell their land for pennies. Because obviously "undeveloped" land without any sort of planning consent is worth very little.
Now those bits of land, which have been put through the planning system and can now be built on, are not being used for HS2. So, they're being sold back to the farmers, right?
No, they're being sold for thousands of times the purchase price to property developers run by the people who donate the most to the government.
It's a land grab, same as the "inheritance tax on farms" thing.
Many people along the HS2 route have been paid double the market price of their house
A farmer's field without planning consent is bought from the farmer priced as a worthless patch of mud, but taxed as though it already had a couple of dozen £500k rabbit hutch houses built on it.
Farm land isn't taxed - it's exempt from business rates
Very narrow minded view that doesn’t take into account people over 60
Just last October the government reduced tax free savings allowances on the Cash ISA for everyone...except he over 60s.
The over 60s have iron-clad "triple locked" state pensions that are _guaranteed_ to grow unsustainably (faster than tax revenue) at the cost of the working tax payer.
We need infrastructure and productivity growth, so the over 60s can take their gold plated compulsory buyouts and go do one.
Very few people are losing their communities due to HS2
Did you ever look into any of it? Because it's 100000% nonsense. One of the reasons why HS2 is over budget so much is because farmers are being paid absolutely through the nose for smallest chunks of land taken for it. Compulsory purchase has to pay the market rate, and in most cases it pays well above that.
>>No, they're being sold for thousands of times the purchase price to property developers run by the people who donate the most to the government.
I'd love to see an example of any piece of land being sold for "thousands of times the purchase price", it would be quite incredible. And the land goes back to auction, anyone can bid on it so not sure how exactly is it sold to "people who donate the most" - care to explain? Or better yet, give an example?
>>It's a land grab, same as the "inheritance tax on farms" thing.
Yes, nothing to do with people like the Percy family owning half of Northumerland for the last 700 years and never paying any inheritance tax on it because they farm on some of it. Nuh huh.
I’m old enough and studied enough to know where I live people in the Great Depression stashed loot in jars and buried it. Who knows what all could be in the occasional backyard recovery. History tells lots of things, not many listen. Utility can be limited in scope.
If you want confirmation, the easiest bits to "check" are Aylesbury and Coventry. London and Birmingham are too big for the features to stand out.
Here is the official HS2 map: https://www.hs2.org.uk/map/?mapView=9_52.0744_-1.8347
To see what it will look like afterwards, try to find High Speed 1, aka the Channel Tunnel Rail Link, now that it's had nearly 20 years to be landscaped and vegetation to grow back. If you don't know what you're looking for, you won't see it.
As opposed to a foot axe I assume
> and 19th Century gold dentures
Ah, them classy 19th Centurians!
However, some significant distinction should be made for what is actually meant here. For such historic finds "hand axe" often means a stone tool with two faces and shaped like a tear drop / round-bottomed triangle. With the 'bottom' face shaped to a crude blade, and the 'top' 'sides' made into a grip. Note there is no shaft, and the way it is used is speculative and likely very varied, as few other tools existed.
The proto-axe if you will.
> Hand axes were held in the palm rather than attached to a wooden handle.