I hope they do build the giant eletric system for GO it would be great in that it would provid a logical end for a catenary line leaving the NEC out of New York City.

The sad part is that what was by far the better route through the Midlands, the Great Central with its larger Euro-standard loading gauge and high-speed alignment, was abandoned in 1969 at the end of the Beeching era due more to office politics at BR than anything else. The GC had been transferred from Eastern Region in the late 1950s to London Midland Region, and because the office cultures of the pre-nationalization railroads survived nationalization, LM saw the GC as the enemy within and did everything they could to wreck it. There have been periodic proposals to revive GC, most recently in 2003, for high speed freight — but some key parts of the right of way, notably through Leicester and Nottingham, have been lost.

Looking at other parts of the network, the new Manchester-area electrification is great. Having been raised in the northwest, I can tell you the Manchester-Preston-Blackpool, Manchester-Liverpool and Liverpool-Wigan gaps in the wire are disruptive to the network and it will be wonderful to finally have through-running electric trains. But this plan still isn’t complete — the four-trains-an-hour Liverpool-Widnes-Warrington-Manchester route, and the intercity Manchester-Leeds-York, Manchester-Sheffield and Leeds-Hull routes are also heavily used and overcrowded and still not earmarked for electrification. Farther south, the cross country routes through Birmingham are also missing from the plan, for example Birmingham-Derby-York, Birmingham-Leicester-Norwich. Birmingham-Oxford and Birmingham-Bristol-Plymouth.

And it’s kind of typical of the UK that the newly electrified northwestern routes are going to get London’s hand-me-down trains.

My view is user-ship gains from London to Nottingham/Derby/Sheffield would be seen sooner if either a branch was created from HS2 or the route was “remodelled” significantly.