To me, the idea of a high-speed railway from London to Manchester and Leeds never sounded like a good idea.
England is a small country, and crowded too. It’s not like France (same population but twice the size) where the TGV can whisk through 800km of relatively empty countryside. Finding the 300km route through the English shires was always going to be a challenge.
So getting HS2 off the ground was a massive undertaking. But successive governments were impatient to see results.
James Stewart, former chief executive of the Infrastructure Commission, in his report published last month pointed to a combination of factors that conspired to make HS2 dissolve into the “shambolic mess” described by transport secretary Heidi Alexander in parliament.
But mismanagement and ineffective oversight lay behind most of the failings.
Ancient woodlands were grubbed up, historic buildings demolished and farmers forced off land worked by generations of their forebears as the gold-plated prestige project blundered ahead. It is especially galling to think that these sacrifices were made for so little in return.
New HS2 chief Mark Wild has the task of salvaging what’s left of the project. Lessons, we hope, will be learned.
But one thing remains to be scrutinised and that is the contribution made to the whole debacle by the contractors. That’s still under wraps, due to contractual constraints.