Jon55 wrote:I live not far from where HS2 will pass through and a popular wedding venue has had a notice to close - very sad because it was a farm with very pretty fields and trees, I attended a wedding there a few years ago. The owners will get compensation but I wouldn't like to live near a high speed railway track. Just imagine you move out into the countryside expecting peace and quiet and then suddenly the building engineers move in and dig a great big trench, uprooting trees that have been there for years and spoiling the countryside. Perhaps I am bias because I never travel by train and use the motorway or airports instead.
You may well be forced to travel by rail as road congestion continually gets worse, but you'll find the trains packed because the government had failed to relieve congestion on the railways due to I dunno, not building HS2 for example.
I'm sorry to hear that the wedding venue/farm has to go, but that just shows you how overpopulated England is, as presumably, it would be easy enough to build around if that were not the case.
As far as the noise, humans and a lot of wildlife adapt to it very well. I've seen wild geese, a kingfisher and a roe deer at Luton Hoo. This is right under the flight path of an international airport (with one aircraft movement every 5-10 minutes). You quite often see rabbits next to the railway line (in a field) and when a train goes past they don't even look up let alone run away. Noise can be minimised on railway lines in certain places by cuttings, tunnels and trees (other vegetation).
Britain’s railway network is the most congested anywhere in Europe
In the last 20 years the number of people travelling on the rail network has doubled, and the rail network, our stations and our platforms are dealing with more passengers than they were ever designed for.
https://www.networkrail.co.uk/running-t ... rade-plan/Since the mid-1990s the number of passengers using Britain’s railway has doubled. At peak times on the busiest parts of the network, Britain’s railway is full.
New capacity is urgently required to meet the continued rise in demand which will mean there will be an extra one billion journeys by the mid-2030s. Conventional ways of providing this capacity by building new railway infrastructure would be hugely disruptive, very high cost and probably unachievable.
https://www.networkrail.co.uk/running-t ... l-railway/https://www.networkrail.co.uk/running-t ... l-railway/See also ERTMS.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_ ... ent_System