You know what the North really needs don't you. To get to London 20 minutes quicker.

£60bn well spent.

...via Birmingham, which is the most obvious route to take when planning a journey from Leeds.

Whichever route you take a rail journey from one major city to any other one is ALWAYS the quickest way to get there even when the trains can "only" travel at 100mph or thereabouts and only for short stretches, even given those limitations to the current system its STILL the fastest way to travel on land.

Its also the most expensive.

Can't these people catch an earlier train?

I'm all for upgrading and investment in the rail network (and desperately needed road expansion) but this is a waste of money that could be spent far better on other road and rail projects.

I'd have slightly more faith in HS2 if it started in The North and made its way down south. Instead it looks like the major objective is to turn Birmingham in a London commuter suburb

With a journey time of just over an hour its already commutable and closer than many of the Home Counties.

They've hung their sales spiel on the wrong hat peg here - what the mainline routes need is exclusive use for inter-city services rather than have local trains shuffling along sections all the way to London, more services to enable a no-standing rule (you'd never get that past H&S if you tried today), no pay-on-the-day for designated services (back to the no standing rule), and cheaper fares which we all know are pitched at a level to dissaude you from trying, check out many mainline routes and see if the price varies through the day, often it doesn't, there is no rush hour, they just don't really want you on the train.

It currently takes 2 hours to get to KX from Wakefield Westgate. HS2 isn't going to stop at Wakefield but it will at Leeds so that means travelling to Leeds to catch HS2, in which time the whole object will have been defeated. I see it linking Birmingham, if it goes ahead that is, and then the funding will mysteriously dry up. HS2 is just a white elephant to try and get votes in the North. It's a sort of 'we haven't forgotten about you up there, look what we're going to do'.

HS3 would be much more useful, linking Leeds and Manchester with a high speed line. At the moment travel from Leeds to Manchester is archaic, it's painful. If you go on the Northern Rail line it's almost an hour and three quarters, on the Transpennine Express it's still pushing an hour. You could drive it in that with a good run. To quote another voting chestnut, 'the Northern powerhouse' is a long way off without a high speed line actually in the North. What the North really needs though is an 'M62 on rails' to link Hull to Liverpool at high speed with better links to York and Harrogate. Linking London to the North with a high speed line isn't going to spread London's wealth and influence further North, quite the opposite, it will create commuter belts further out of London for London. The bulk of the travel will be South bound.

When you compare UK railways to European railways, we're light years behind. Their Trans-Europe Express has been and gone and we're still chugging along between neighbouring cities with delays, packed out carriages and sub-standard trains.

I agree HS3 is a good start, but what it really needed was to link Hull to Leeds to Manchester to Liverpool. A sort of railway M62. That would've been worthwhile in my opinion.
But as Jerry says we need cities linked together. That's what HS2 should've been. Linking the major cities across the country.

I also don't see why, if capacity is the issue, we aren't seriously looking at double decker trains. I know that bridges over the line may need altering but modern double deckers are only about half a metre taller than some current UK trains.

In my opinion we don't really need HS2, the money would be better spent on building new motorways in the north (aswell as finishing the ones that were half built in the 70's and just stopped. HS3 is a good idea. I don't know what rail travel is like in Yorkshire but on this side of the Pennines it is very slow on outdated rolling stock.

On the high speed mainline it's fairly sufficient until you have to slow down for the inevitable local service chuggers which themselves are akin to Victorian rail travel.

I'm a massive fan of rail travel and try to use it whenever I can living about a minute walk from Wakefield Westgate station, but on some of the UK rail routes it would still be beneficial to carry a copy of Bradshaw's Guide.