Can't these people catch an earlier train?

I'm all for upgrading and investment in the rail network (and desperately needed road expansion) but this is a waste of money that could be spent far better on other road and rail projects.

I'd have slightly more faith in HS2 if it started in The North and made its way down south. Instead it looks like the major objective is to turn Birmingham in a London commuter suburb

With a journey time of just over an hour its already commutable and closer than many of the Home Counties.

They've hung their sales spiel on the wrong hat peg here - what the mainline routes need is exclusive use for inter-city services rather than have local trains shuffling along sections all the way to London, more services to enable a no-standing rule (you'd never get that past H&S if you tried today), no pay-on-the-day for designated services (back to the no standing rule), and cheaper fares which we all know are pitched at a level to dissaude you from trying, check out many mainline routes and see if the price varies through the day, often it doesn't, there is no rush hour, they just don't really want you on the train.

It currently takes 2 hours to get to KX from Wakefield Westgate. HS2 isn't going to stop at Wakefield but it will at Leeds so that means travelling to Leeds to catch HS2, in which time the whole object will have been defeated. I see it linking Birmingham, if it goes ahead that is, and then the funding will mysteriously dry up. HS2 is just a white elephant to try and get votes in the North. It's a sort of 'we haven't forgotten about you up there, look what we're going to do'.

HS3 would be much more useful, linking Leeds and Manchester with a high speed line. At the moment travel from Leeds to Manchester is archaic, it's painful. If you go on the Northern Rail line it's almost an hour and three quarters, on the Transpennine Express it's still pushing an hour. You could drive it in that with a good run. To quote another voting chestnut, 'the Northern powerhouse' is a long way off without a high speed line actually in the North. What the North really needs though is an 'M62 on rails' to link Hull to Liverpool at high speed with better links to York and Harrogate. Linking London to the North with a high speed line isn't going to spread London's wealth and influence further North, quite the opposite, it will create commuter belts further out of London for London. The bulk of the travel will be South bound.

When you compare UK railways to European railways, we're light years behind. Their Trans-Europe Express has been and gone and we're still chugging along between neighbouring cities with delays, packed out carriages and sub-standard trains.

I agree HS3 is a good start, but what it really needed was to link Hull to Leeds to Manchester to Liverpool. A sort of railway M62. That would've been worthwhile in my opinion.
But as Jerry says we need cities linked together. That's what HS2 should've been. Linking the major cities across the country.

I also don't see why, if capacity is the issue, we aren't seriously looking at double decker trains. I know that bridges over the line may need altering but modern double deckers are only about half a metre taller than some current UK trains.

In my opinion we don't really need HS2, the money would be better spent on building new motorways in the north (aswell as finishing the ones that were half built in the 70's and just stopped. HS3 is a good idea. I don't know what rail travel is like in Yorkshire but on this side of the Pennines it is very slow on outdated rolling stock.

On the high speed mainline it's fairly sufficient until you have to slow down for the inevitable local service chuggers which themselves are akin to Victorian rail travel.

I'm a massive fan of rail travel and try to use it whenever I can living about a minute walk from Wakefield Westgate station, but on some of the UK rail routes it would still be beneficial to carry a copy of Bradshaw's Guide.

I agree, I think rail travel is both vital for the country and is very useful in some cases. But it desperately needs updating to the 21st century. Things like better, quicker, city links. Higher capacity. More branch lines etc etc.
It also must be accompanied by big investment in roads and have a much better link between the 2. Making it easier to access the rail network.

The problem is the "Sprinter" rolling stock used on most cross-country services.

These things are basically 'buses on rails', introduced as a cheap option in the 1980s. Powered by a hefty 5.9 litre Cummins 'B' Series engine, they should all have already been retired but the private operators can't afford to replace them. By the look of it, neither can the government because they've offered an extension to the Sprinter's life and grants to refurb them.

The fact that hardly any of the existing stock meet EU regulations on wheelchair access is simply yet another reason for the "swivel-eyed loons" to come up with yet anothe anti-EU rant

I got the last train from Liverpool Lime Street to St. Helens tonight (terminating at Wigan). It's always the same story at the weekend. They put an old, crappy 2 carriage train on. Too many people try to get on so the train can't leave so they have to couple it up to another train. People complain that it's taking too long so there are arguments. Eventually they attatch the other train and it leaves half an hour behind schedule. They are currently working to electrify the line which should be finished soon but we're not even sure that they will even get the electric trains.

The last train out of Leeds to Sheffield on a Saturday night is EXACTLY the same, yet it still turns up every week with the same old two carriages and the station staff have the same problem of too many drunks trying to get on not enough carriages. I always try to get the one before the last as it's a slightly more pleasurable experience.

Now that the German Christmas market is running in Leeds the last train becomes pretty much a no go area. I've caught it a few times when a gig has run over and missed the previous train. The sick and the dying all slumped in seats, covered from head to toe in scraps of fast food, alpha males giving it the big one to get the extra carriage round as quick as possible, there's always a couple or if you're lucky (or unlucky) two couples who have been out all day and have realised that they actually hate each other's company, and then there's the token annoying guy who's realised this is a 'situation' and needs to put himself onto everyone to have a good time, he's a kind of living Keep Calm and Carry On poster but with bad dress sense and 8 pints in him. It's what I imagine the last train out of a nuclear dystopia to be like. Hell.