Please Mind the Gap Between the Train and Your Destination

Yesterday the Transport Secretary Louise Haigh told BBC 5Live that it would make “absolutely no sense” to have the end of the HS2 line at Old Oak Common.

Haigh’s comments come ahead of a formal decision being made on whether HS2’s line will run into Euston (or instead terminate at Old Oak Common). Such a decision is set to be announced by the end of the month.

With Old Oak Common Station lying 6.7 miles away from Euston, 7.3 miles away from Parliament Square and 9 miles away from Tower Bridge, support for the idea has been the subject of heated political debate.

Any decision to have the line terminate at Old Oak Common would of course require passengers traveling to/from central London to change trains, potentially annulling any time saved on the shorter journey time that HS2 advertises. For any passengers considering the potential impact of tube disruption or strikes, they may be interested to learn that the walk between Old Oak Common and London Euston is 2h 19m.

Proponents of Old Oak Common however point to how the cost of tunnels between Old Oak Common Euston alone would cost north of £1bn. That said, two 1,700-tonne boring machines from Germany have already delivered for the leg.

The latest controversy comes against a backdrop of spiralling costs and U-turns. Last year, HS2’s second leg – from Birmingham to Manchester – was scrapped. At the time, the government claimed that £35bn could be saved by axing the phase all together, despite £2.3bn having already been spent on the stage (the equivalent of around £65 for each and every taxpayer).

Regarding spiralling costs, in 2010 the estimated cost of the whole project totalled some £30bn. By 2016, this had inflated to £80bn before being further revised higher to a gargantuan £107bn by 2020.

Attention now turns to the formal decision being made on where HS2 will terminate, in addition to the Autumn Budget and the extent to which the government will allocate funds for national infrastructure projects.

The FT’s Alexandra Prokopenko has written an article on the Kremlin’s intention to increase military spending as Putin continues to plough resources into his war against Ukraine. It’s understood that the Kremlin will look to increase military spending by 22.6% next year – representative of a 58% increase from the 2023.

This means that Moscow would be spending 40% of its federal budget on the conflict which according to Prokopenko will place Putin in a “trilemma” of “simultaneously maintaining a balanced financial system, meeting social obligations and sustain defence spending at current levels”.

The article highlights how areas of the Russian economy are already in decline given how federal spending has been diverted to the war effort, and that the economy will continue to be put under pressures from its declining workforce and international sanctions.

With experts warning of a category 5 Hurricane hitting Florida later tonight, millions of people are evacuating their homes across the state.

President Joe Biden (who cancelled his trip to Germany) has warned citizens in risk areas that “it’s a matter of life and death” and that the “time to evacuate is now, now, now”. He further warned that it could be the deadliest storm in a century.

It’s expected that Hurricane Milton will reach speeds of 180mph.

The area is still trying to come to terms with the destruction caused by last month’s Hurricane Helene, which killed over 200 people and caused some $38.5 billion worth of damage.