The downside of High Speed Rail

Patrick Crozier thinks high speed rail is boring:

I have now travelled on high-speed lines in France, Belgium, Italy, Germany and Japan. And they are all dull. They're too synthetic. Too quiet. Too antiseptic. Too fast even. They don't move about enough. They don't make any satisfying noises - like the rush of air against the superstructure, far less the (now not quite so familiar) clickety-clack of British commuter railways. Far better the joys of a British Mark III carriage or even the deep-sprung seating of the workmanlike Mark I.

Ah, sometimes, nothing quite beats travelling in a old pressure-ventilated Mk1 or Mk2 with all the windows open and a big locomotive at the front. The over-silenced underfloor engines of something like a Voyager is no comparison with the roar of a English Electric EE12CSVT or a Sulzer 12LDA28C!

The view from the window isn't as interesting either. Typical high speed lines in Europe have a significant proportion of the route in tunnel, and much of the sections that aren't buried underground are hidden behind sound barriers. No views of picturesque villages from the train window. And with passenger trains segregated from the freight and local trains, no wayside stations or marshalling yards either.

Patrick also makes the valid point that service frequency and network density are as important as maximum speed when it comes to overall journey times. Just about every long distance journey I make by train depends on a local connection train at each end. I find how good or bad the connections are makes as much difference as to the overall end-to-end timing as the speed of the intercity section of the routes.