Another 20 years of weekend engineering works

[Nick]

 

[Snoopy]

 

[Barman]

And we invented fooking trains 

If only we had kept Mr Kipling out of the industry. 

 

[Barman]

Anyhoo... briefly on-topic...

The cash would have been better spent on upgrading the railways than propping up failing banks IMHO.

Problem is the UK has fuck-all Engineering capability now so the engineering works will be outsourced and the trains manufactured in Germany. 

[Snoopy]

But we do have a Banking Industry that is the biggest money earner the UK has left ..... so why spend our money on reducing a train journey by 20 minutes at the loss of the only world class money maker that we have?

A second point ..... high speed trains work well in France and Japan where the majority of the population live in flats in a few large cities and travel between them. In the UK the population is far more suburban and the same travel requirements do not apply.

[Barman]

Saving banks that should have failed due to their incompetence will not strengthen the banking sector IMHO.

Pouring billions into engineering (software or hardware) and ensuring that the goods, services and labour were sourced in the UK would have produced much better long-term economic prospects. Plus it could have provided additional benefits of having shorter train journeys, attracting investment to the UK, boosting exports, etc.

Oh, but of course you couldn't do that because of EU roolz. 

[Snoopy]

You cannot unpick the past and reknit it like an old jumper. The UK must use what it has and move on. Most of our problems, or at least those that do not come from European legislation designed to keep the French Farmers and Spanish Fishermen happy, come from a backward view of our place in the world. The world has moved on and we have to keep pace or drop behind. Television was invented in this country and today the last surviving TV manufacturing plant in the UK closes (It is Japanese owned). Face it ~ we don't have and never will again have a manufacturing base on which to build. So let's do what we are good at and at the moment that happens to be Insurance and Finance. We have become a service based economy so we must accept it and bloody get on and be the best we can at that.
What exports are we going to see improve by shaving 20 minutes off a train journey, assuming the damned trains ever run to time which is unlikely. We don't actually have many exports apart from Scotch whisky based along the proposed "high speed line" and most of that goes by road and sea.

Sorry BM but on this one we must agree to differ. In my opinion there is no benefit to the majority in this proposal and for that reason alone I predict it will never happen.

[Barman]

The problem with banking IMHO is that it can pick up and move anywhere where there is an Intermong link - why should it stay in one of the most expensive and overtaxed countries in the world? The bloody Spanish own most of the banks anyway don't they...?

And I think you have a simplistic view on the Engineering - it isn't just about cutting a few minutes from journey, it is potentially much more than that.

Imagine if we had a vision of where we wanted to be in twenty or thirty years... Perhaps a modern, integrated transport system with high speed trains, perhaps a major force in nuclear power or fusion. The bloody new line won't be built for twenty years anyway...

Then you sit down and ask 'what do we need to achieve this?'.

Well, you need people with skills in Engineering, maths and science obviously. So you close down all the BSc courses in 'Trisha', media studies and 'Beckham' and instead open new places in maths, physics, Engineering, software science. You start to train the graduates that we'll need to achieve major engineering and science projects and you fund companies that are researching science and engineering.

You could use the money that we've pissed-away on failing banks for instance.

It won't happen overnight but in time you wiull have actually achieved a skilled, trained workforce than can actually deishn and build products that the company and the world needs. Not just a bunch of hooray Henries pissing champagne up the wall and gambling everybodies cash on the latest high risk venture on Bogata or wherever...

Imagine, instead of just riding on high speed trains we might even be able to sell some to the Krouts!   

[Snoopy]

Catch a train in France and you will travel through mile after mile of open countryside. Same in Japan. In the UK there are no miles and miles of open countryside. You pass through village after village after village.

Now are those people living in the villages to be denied the right to travel on these new trains? If not then the train will never get up to speed before it has to stop again at the next station. That is my point about the railways. Personally I would like to go back to the pre Beeching era when everyone who wanted could and did catch a train for short as well as long journeys but that's all gone now. Our country is different. John Betjeman is dead and buried. We simply don't have the space to run both sorts of railway and if we are going to copy the French model then we will end up with everyone driving to their nearest major city to catch a train. In that case we might as well go by air because the delays at stations will be the same as at airports. Our answer lies in better road services (Greyhound style coaches perhaps) or better yet home working so that people don't have to travel for work. We don't export much but we import a lot. That is where railways should be looking. Transporting imports to point of sale and removing all those socking great trucks off the roads would go a long way toward "greening" our country and saving lives.

Let's leave it there shall we? I see what you are saying and it would be nice to think it could come to be but it isn't going to happen and if you really thought it would you wouldn't be in Cyprus ~ would you?

PS ~ Now that's a point. Home working. We could do that if only we invested properly in fast broadband connections like those in Singapore. We are a small enough country to do that. France and Germany couldn't because of their sheer size ~ neither could the Yanks, India or Africa. Then we would be world beaters.

[Barman]

Ah... that's why I said this: -

Imagine if we had a vision of where we wanted to be in twenty or thirty years... Perhaps a modern, integrated transport system with high speed trains, perhaps a major force in nuclear power or fusion. The bloody new line won't be built for twenty years anyway...

The point I'm making is that 'backing the bankers' isn't in my opinion the way to long-term growth and wealth. Who'd have thought ten years ago that Miss D would be calling India to complain about her Intermong connection...?

We need to invest in science and Engineering skills that will benefit both the country and the balance of payments. Anything else we do, be it a high speed West coast line or work-at-home broadband will involved importing products and skills and will merely benefit our competitors.

[Snoopy]

To borrow a phrase from the THW

"Whatever"

[Barman]

 

[Snoopy]

I resisted putting that emoticon on 


But honestly I don't want to fall out. We have different points of view on this. I doubt that either of us will survive long enough to be proved wrong or right so lets leave it there. OK? 

[Miss Demeanour]

So when can we get flying cars 

The sci -fi of my youth promised me such things by now 

[Snoopy]

Probably before we get High Speed Trains