With a new Transport Minster, Patrick McLoughlin, announced today, comes the opportunity for a re-think not only of HS2 but also of the Hitachi IEP. The penalties for cancellation of the first tranche will probably be horrendous, but this is not the train the railways need. If the fleet order can be confined to the current 370 vehicles, it would be worth taking a loss to avoid saddling the country's railways with hundreds of trains that are unsuitable for the services on which they will be operating and are an overpriced and over-elaborate solution to a relatively simple problem.
I wrote to my MP on two entirely separate issues recently. The first was to do with the replacement for the Inter City 125 train, which at £2.6 million per vehicle, is twice as expensive as it ought to be. The second concerned the benefits of a switch from business rate and Council Tax to a tax based on site values. In both cases, the replies were full of spurious, unsubstantiated assertions and completely flawed arguments. This is typical. You will not get an iota of sense from the government on any area of public policy at all - finance, economics, trade and employment, agriculture, housing, health, transport, energy. All junk. If you write to your MP you will invariably receive answers that are an insult to your intelligence, no matter what subject you are writing about. Of course they cannot understand statistics. They are innumerate. Whitehall is staffed with idiots with a high IQ. Look at their IT projects. And mind your purse, they will have that too.
Kommentarer
No luck, full steam ahead from the ex-miner..
http://www.dft.gov.uk/publications/draft-iep-train-layouts
In first class the facing double seats are perfectly aligned to the windows, the single seats (airline) appear to be aligned every other one.
In second class it's sardines, with a view of pot luck