Breezy day trips..

I see there's trouble brewing around the HS2 project, there's speculation now that it won't terminate in Euston, Central London but at Old Oak Common in the West of the city instead. I'm no strategic infrastructure planner but I think that might actually be a good thing. That particular location is bang on the Great Western Main Line out of Paddington and is only 10 minutes or so from that central terminus, it's also a fairly run-down area and perhaps in need of a financial boost? Clearly there are pros and cons to anywhere that you care to pick on our little island but Old Oak Common is a brown field site in a great position accessible from the West and the East and in need of some development (if anywhere is); it's not like the area around Euston needs any more investment (or development). 

Full disclosure, this switch of terminus would suit me as I live West of London and having a Northern rail hub located on the main line I use most frequently would mean significantly reduced rail times to get from where I live up to places like Manchester and Leeds. At the moment it takes me nearly 4 hours (direct) to get to Manchester from Reading (my nearest rail hub) and around 3 hours with a slog across London on the tube if I go via Kings Cross. With a terminus for HS2 in Old Oak Common I reckon that would drop to around 2 hours and only involve one simple change, which would mean day trips to Manchester becoming feasible and Birmingham a breeze. 

People often cite France as the model for this kind of inter-city rail connectivity and if you've ever travelled long distance in that country you realise what we could have had with sufficient imagination and investment. A few years ago I did the Nice-Paris route on the TGV it was amazing, at some points clocking 300 km/h, much more civilised than the plane and certainly easier than driving (which I've also done a few times) We are prone to NIMBY'ism in this country, we want to be a G7 country and play at the top table of nations but we're reluctant to invest in infrastructure to ensure we have the clout to do it. Clearly there are environmental considerations, doing this kind of project is not without sacrifice, which should be weighed with utmost care and mitigated, but anyone who has slogged up the M6 in recent years would realise that millions of cars each with one person in them doing these same journey is simply not scalable, commercially or environmentally.