Britain is building one of the world’s most expensive railways

It is really a shame, that the west cannot build cheap infrastructure anymore.

Most of the money isn't being spent on building a railway, it's being spent on not building it, such as by redesigning Euston station to be smaller and more expensive, repeatedly, and making sure to spend a large amount of money demolishing buildings and digging a big hole in the ground before cancelling it.

Make no mistake, this was deliberate Conservative policy. They knew (as everyone else did) that they were going to lose the last election, years before the fact, and chose to set money on fire and sabotage the country's infrastructure in order to make life harder for the Labour government that was coming and ensure they couldn't get a win.

Given the high amount of human trafficking that is involved in practically all construction of infrastructure, it is kind of strange how expensive it really is. It seems less and less of the budget is spent on actually construction.

Sorry but for some ballance, the current prime minister stood in parliament and opposed the entire HS2 project "on cost and merit" and voted against the project in 2016. He said "the only sensible plan is to abandon the project altogether".

> They knew (as everyone else did) that they were going to lose the last election, years before the fact, and chose to set money on fire and sabotage the country's infrastructure in order to make life harder for the Labour government that was coming and ensure they couldn't get a win.

Actually HS2 was never popular in Conservative constituencies and if they had a manifesto pledge to scrap the project entirely, they might've stood a chance.

I understand all those against HS2 due to various reasons (costs, environment etc), but what is the alternative? If the current tracks are at capacity there is no easy solution. If they stop the project now, surely, that's all the money spent so far down the drain?

Mismanagement aside, HS2 required 8000+ different permits along its route [1], as well as years of opposition and legal battles from environmental groups and NIMBYs.

This is a significant portion of the cost, huge amounts of 'green tunnels' and cuttings are being created where they are not needed.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2024/nov/07/cost-of-shed...

The £100m bat tunnel is "the tip of the iceberg" apparently.

They're not even sure it'll help the bats...

It’s more that construction is one of the few things that hasn’t benefited significantly from information technology so it looks relatively more expensive.

Farming, retail, energy, manufacturing, etc all got vastly more efficient but land, education, and construction didn’t so what looks like huge price increases is largely inflation. It’s the same reason artisanal goods seem so expensive when that’s how everything used to be made.

And of course, just to top off the fucking insanity here, the UK has a system of governance where a simple HoC majority can say "yeah, we're building it, lolsoz we'll pay for your house and sorry about the bats" and all the red tape would literally disappear. This isn't America where people can bang on about the constitution or some shit. The Tories didn't want to piss off the voters, but Labour are simply lacking the cojones here.

Encourage WFH, discourage business travel. Why are all these people travelling anyway?

What they needed was another line to relieve congestion on the WCML. But it needn't have been High Speed Rail. HSR is too expensive and impractical. Regular Rail was sufficient. The French call their HSR "debt on wheels".

Regular Rail.

Or houses, or cars, or just about anything really.

By the west I presume you mean US+Canada+UK. Maybe you're including Australia and New Zealand?

France, Germany, Spain, Italy, Sweden, Denmark, Norway, etc. do it just fine. They have good various combinations of urban and interurban public transit which was expanded in the past 10-20 years. (be it high speed rail or new subway lines or big bridges).

Perspective: China has 45 000 km of high speed rail, while the UK is struggling to build 500.

Im sure Regular rail like WCML would've been much cheaper and less disruptive.

Leisure is already more than half of the trips on UK rail. It’s mostly people living their lives. Reducing demand seems mostly a dead end to me except perhaps along very busy commuting corridors, of which there aren’t that many and of which demand is still high at weekends because work hubs also tend to be leisure hubs.

You wait until you hear about the Lower Thames Crossing. £300m so far, and they've not event started digging.

https://www.kentonline.co.uk/gravesend/news/lower-thames-cro...

Regular rail is ruinously expensive in this country too, East West Rail, which is an unelectrified <100mph railway, is probably going to end up costing in the region of £10bn and take twenty years to build.

Even local tram projects with distances in the single digits can cost hundreds of millions of pounds now, it's ludicrous.

Perspective: China is suffering terribly from the out of control debt used to build their high speed rail system and incidents are being systematically covered up rather than used to improve reliability of service. It's a trillion dollar blow out, not the great success that so many claim it to be.

Not sure if this is sarcasm.

Assuming not.... No. The premium cost on the project related to its running speed is not significant. Planning and engineering a brand new 125mph railway doesn't cost much less than planning and engineering a brand new 250mph railway.

I'm afraid it is not as simple as that, and there is a lot of misinformation about HS2 that should be addressed.

Firstly, the 'bat shed' (officially SWBMS) is expected to cost £100m. This is neither expensive nor wasteful for a structure nearly 1 kilometre long and "designed to accommodate up to 36 high-speed trains passing through the structure every hour of operation for 120 years, plus frequent conventional rail traffic in addition" as reported by Architects' Journal[1].

One should also refer to Natural England's own press release on the subject[2]. The first paragraph is worth quoting verbatim: "Natural England has not required HS2 Ltd to build the reported structure, or any other structure, nor advised on the design or costs. The need for the structure was identified by HS2 Ltd more than 10 years ago, following extensive surveying of bat populations by its own ecologists in the vicinity of Sheephouse Wood." It is absurd to think that Natural England would want to build a kilometre-long structure beside a forest if they didn't think it was of net benefit to the environment, yet that is the spin that most newspapers are putting on it.

Additionally, Louise Haigh is, as far as I can tell, a genuinely pro-rail minister. She is for instance the only cabinet member to have filed any significant MP's expenses for rail travel. However, it should also be remembered that the current Labour government's publicity strategy has consistently been to depict all projects started by the previous Tory governments as wasteful or corrupt; thus, we should take any of her communications with a pinch of salt.

I am very excited about HS2, which is being built to standard European loading gauges and will allow for high-capacity double-decker train services. Yet this does not have to be at the expense of local ecology, and these cuttings and tunnels are necessary to support both goals.

[1]: https://www.architectsjournal.co.uk/news/transport-secretary...

[2]: https://naturalengland.blog.gov.uk/2024/11/08/natural-englan...

I heard someone say that they wished it had been called High Capacity 2, rather than High Speed 2.

What we need is more rail capacity, while people opposed to this project latched onto the idea that no one really wanted to get from London to Birmingham (a somewhat unlovely city that is the first major stop on the line) faster.

The original plan was to have 18 trains running every hour in each direction between London and Birmingham [0]. This is tube frequency, and very difficult to do. Therefore the specs and designs were quite expensive. But however sophisticated (or not) the trains where, a _lot_ of money is needed to buy out property holders and construction.

However, this is a complete paradigm shift in the way of travel. This would have made Birmingham a suburb of London, as you can just go to the train station and hop on the next train as you do if you were to travel from anywhere within London.

The newspapers kept reporting the "faster" travel times which only shaves off "a few minutes" for a huge amount of money. But that was not the point. The point was capacity through frequency.

Over the years, this has been watered down. Now still a huge amount of money is spent on property buyouts and nature preservation / protection (the same higher frequency trains would have needed as well), on a marginally better service.

It seems to me (maybe thats wrong) that a lot of the fancy tech that is needed for increasing frequency could be had at relatively low extra cost, because there is this high base budget that needs to be spent whatever the performance of this new rail-line. So now HS2 is the worst of both worlds: expensive works delivering only a small improvement.

[0]: https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/5a82b56740f0b...

California -- here, hold my Chardonnay

Look at earnings vs. housing costs, controlling for location and size. That ratio has not remained fixed.

This is what I find really bizarre, huge sums spent on hypothetical risks based on pure conjecture, e.g. the bat shed, with apparently not even any compelling evidence presented for such risks.

It's almost like the target speed of the line isn't the problem.

Capacity is about taking passenger services off other lines which greatly increases their freight capacity.

The HS2 line itself is a kind of side benefit in a sense.

> The point was capacity through frequency.

Mm, the point was increasing capacity on the WCML, for which there is large demand right now

What's murkier is what capacity is needed 50+ years from now on the new line. It was never going to be full day 1, but you don't build new expensive things hoping to run them at 100% capacity from the very start. Passenger growth was (pre-covid) only going up, so a design that could cope with passenger flows for the next 50 years was inevitable.

Roughly translating the Japanese "Shinkansen" as "New trunk line" or "New main line" would have worked fine. Or "West coast relief line".

Birmingham is the second largest city in the UK. I think people know that, even if they make fun of it.

Thats a normal Shinkansen fregvency on busier stations - saw departures every 3 minutes in Hiroshima station. :)

I think this article recycles a lot of the arguments that have happened over this and as usual doesn't make the correct case for why it's being done.

[NB to get passenger services off other lines because they dramatically reduce freight capacity]

As for the costs...well, some people in the UK don't want power lines, don't want wind turbines, don't want nuclear power plants, don't want anything in fact except the freedom to continue living their comfortable ruralish lives while the rest of us starve and die out and preferably just go away. They do, however, want Waitrose and possibly Sainsburys to keep on functioning and possibly their electric lights.

If there's a price to be paid - they're not going to pay any of it. So everything is a battle, and it's not an autocracy so a government that wants to be elected again has to think twice before taking on enemies.

There are some lines that were built for ideological/vanity project reasons, I dunno who tf thought it would be a good idea to build HSR to xinjiang, but the coastal lines are actually profitable [1] (take the government numbers with a huge grain of salt though)

[1] https://defencepk.com/forums/threads/china-state-railway-end...

There’s a lot of ways to slice these numbers. A 1,500 square foot house in rural Tennessee has seen a very different shift in prices over the last 50 or 100 years vs a 1,500 square foot apartment in Manhattan over that same time periods.

Similarly, apples to apples job comparisons are difficult. Many modern jobs are quite different. An Amazon warehouse worker works a lot harder than would be typical for a random warehouse worker in 2000.

How is it suffering terribly?

Parliament does indeed have absolute superiority and the Government does indeed have an absolute majority. However, it is not in any way possible for the Government to say 'lolsoz' and bypass all restrictions as you put it. This is for several reasons:

- 'Judicial review' has become increasingly common as a check on the power of Parliament and the Government, fulfilling the need for enforcement of individual rights in a country without a singular, written constitution. [1] for a discussion on this topic by a senior British judge. Parliament would need to repeal the Judicial Review and Courts Act 2022 in order to avoid it. The oft-derided Human Rights Act may also prevent due process from being circumvented.

- Local authorities have the primary say in planning consent, although they can be overridden on appeal. The Government and public sector contractors must therefore apply for permission just as any other legal entity; building HS2 does not in theory given them any special treatment.

- The 'red tape' isn't there without reason. Although it does indeed prevent some kinds of construction, that is precisely the reason why some of it was introduced. There are powerful lobbying groups for property rights, the environment and conservation just to name a few - these are powerful because many people value these things dearly. The public does not have a infinite tolerance for rash government decision-making either, so any proposed construction must be carefully weighed against its ramifications on government popularity and thus chances of re-election.

I hope I have been able to give a bit of balance to the idea that laziness is any part of government thinking at this point in time.

[1]: https://www.judiciary.uk/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/is-judic...

Nitpick: the Colne Valley viaduct is not the longest British viaduct, that's the Bromford viaduct. It is the longest railway viaduct.

If you are building a railway through very expensive real estate, it's going to be expensive. The California High Speed Rail project is having the same issues. Buying up property in Los Angeles and San Francisco is super expensive.

I did not know that they have such a high frequency. Thats amazing.

I think I heard somewhere that the rail operator(s?) in Japan (like Hong Kong) own a lot of real-estate close to the stations. Therefore they have a high incentive to provide an effective service, because it props up property prices. In the same time the property prices can be used to fund public infrastructure.

This is something else that the UK could learn from other countries. Because by just operating trains it is hard to make back the money needed to build and maintain the infrastructure. Its almost like the inverse of the tragedy of the commons, where instead of externalising costs, the UK is externalising the profits of these works.

Paying less for the same thing?

Isn't the problem the price-tag?

> "Natural England has not required HS2 Ltd to build the reported structure, or any other structure, nor advised on the design or costs."

yes, they didn't strictly require them to do it, but if they hadn't done it (or something very similar) they wouldn't have removed their objection to the planning application

standard quango double speak

> Yet this does not have to be at the expense of local ecology

the opportunity cost of this bat tunnel is massive

you could do a lot of good with £100 million of taxpayers money, vs. some giant concrete 1km long structure

additionally, it will be years after construction before the trains start running, and bats will inevitably end up roosting in the structure...

It's a surprising black hole on the map, seen from London. In 20 years in the country, it has never come into any conversation I've had except for "have you ever been to Birmingham? No, me neither." For a major city so accessible from London, it's very odd.

If the ultimate goal was to bypass freight - none of which travels at 125mph - wouldn't it have been cheaper to build a new freight line and upgrade the speed and capacity of the WCML?

Or does a 75mph freight railway cost as much as a 250mph passenger railway?

A reminder that the cost of the project, even unfinished, with none of the benefits of the lines to Manchester and Leeds, is of the same order as NASA's current moonshot budget.

judicial review is a check on the legality of use of executive power as granted by parliament, not on parliament's ability to legislate

if parliament legislated to grant the government the ability to do whatever it wanted in regards to HS2 then there would be nothing for judicial review to... review

the government can also override local authorities for planning decisions for e.g. projects of national significance

> However, it is not in any way possible for the Government to say 'lolsoz'

No, but Parliament can. You are confusing checks on Government power with checks on Parliament’s power, as detailed by a sibling reply.

The UK did just fine with HS1 - built under budget - and the Elizabeth Line, which was over and late but has been a huge commercial and popular success.

HS2 is just a bad answer to the problems its trying to address.

Performing major works on an existing line to upgrade its speed (which, given alignments might not even be possible) is probably the worst-case scenario in terms of cost and disruption.

For the WCML specifically, _we already did that_ in the form of the modernization program (early-2000s) which was over 10 years of disruption, and massively expensive.

And HS2 isn't just for freight, it's also for providing higher capacity and frequency of local stopping passenger trains. The WCML already connects the population centres, so the local stopping trains have to stay there. The thing that really kills capacity is the co-mingling of 125mph and lower speed (90/75) traffic. Remove the 125mph traffic (onto, say, a dedicated high-speed single-mode line) and you _massively_ increase capacity on the existing line.

> A reminder that the cost of the project, even unfinished, with none of the benefits of the lines to Manchester and Leeds, is of the same order as NASA's current moonshot budget.

This is not a railway problem. This is a government problem.

> I think I heard somewhere that the rail operator(s?) in Japan (like Hong Kong) own a lot of real-estate close to the stations.

NJB mentioned it during their recent japan video (https://youtu.be/6dKiEY0UOtA?t=964) but I'm sure they're far from the only one.

> This is something else that the UK could learn from other countries. Because by just operating trains it is hard to make back the money needed to build and maintain the infrastructure. Its almost like the inverse of the tragedy of the commons, where instead of externalising costs, the UK is externalising the profits of these works.

Yeah, the other way is the "classic" european way of the train being a state monopoly operated as a benefit to society, in which case it doesn't really need to "make back the money", because the economic value it builds for the country is the "profit margin". Sadly the deregulation sprees of the late 90s have mostly consisted of selling off the crown jewels or setting up weirdo groups engaging in growth for the sake of growth with no regard to socioeconomic benefits for the people.

At this point wouldn't it be cheaper to just move the capital to somewhere in the Midlands, and in so doing hitting two birds with one stone? I.e. decongesting London and giving (back) lots of economic opportunities to Midlands itself (which seems like it got the shortest of sticks as a result of Britain's des-industrialisation) and even to Northern England. And I'm not just talking about moving some BBC offices and stuff like that, I'm talking about moving the whole damn thing, i.e. the Government and even the Parliament.

Otherwise the entire island of Britain (or the English part of it, at least) would be geared towards its South-Eastern corner only, and there's only so much that you can alleviate that by infrastructure works.

and China has 9326410 sqkm of land while the UK is 243610 sqkm, i.e. the UK is 2.6% the size of China.

2.6% of 45000 is 1170.

I don't understand how you can claim £100m is "not expensive", that's around £3 per tax-payer in the country, for one small aspect of the whole project.

Complaints about "waste" of government overspend went from [10s of thousands](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cones_Hotline) in the early 1990s to [millions](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millennium_Dome) in the late 90s to billions today.

Wages surely haven't gone up 1000x in that time, £100m is still a large cost, even if it's a drop in the ocean compared to the overall HS2 overspend.

100% this - there are massive developments around major stations & you can see it even in rural areas. A local operator just so appears to have a hotel next to their railway station or run the gift shop in the museum where their buses go.

Or they might run a famous all-female theater troupe & generate extra demand on their line: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Takarazuka_Revue

"The Takarazuka Revue Company is a division of the Hankyu Railway company; all members of the troupe are employed by Hankyu."

I like this essentially symbiotic relationship as it seems to motivate the companies to do things right.

> I don't understand how you can claim £100m is "not expensive", that's around £3 per tax-payer in the country,

I don't really think that's a useful statistic in isolation. Surely any investment is all about the eventual economic benefit? £3 per person to receive £1 is a bad deal. £3 per person to receive £5 is a good deal.

The Parliament building is literally falling down, so at least temporarily moving out to somewhere while they rebuild it has been proposed a few times. Probably it would take it actually burning down for MPs to leave.

https://committees.parliament.uk/committee/127/public-accoun...

Sure, but It's a 1km concrete structure, what economic benefit do you think it'll deliver in isolation?

Overall HS2 might deliver billions of economic improvement, although current cost benefit analyses suggest it won't deliver much benefit compared to it's runaway costs. Most the ones I can find are already outdated, talking about improvements which will no longer happen or costs which have already been surpassed, and the cost/benefit ratios of those were already shaky.

HS2 is using a different gauge!?

China has built the best and largest high-speed rail system in the world, at a fraction of the time and cost it's taken other developed countries to build tiny (in comparison) systems....BUT AT WHAT COST????

> It's a trillion dollar blow out, not the great success that so many claim it to be.

Source?

Very surprised by that statistic. For me it's something like a 99-1 split for business travel.

How's your HyperLoop coming along?

There's no mystery, it's just very orderly corruption.

On the other hand there's a big part of the UK that doesn't want to work or support itself and does want to confiscate other peoples money in order to continue to sit in social housing with social wellfare and a plethora of other social services.

We can have a libertarian country.

Or we can have a social democratic one.

We can't have both.

The cuttings and tunnels mean lots of freight is on the roads right now, and half the project has been sacrificed because it was too expensive to continue in this way politically. In the mean time, we’ll be going well into the 2040s where we won’t be able to place more trains in and around Manchester. The plan to build Northern Powerhouse Rail is basically not possible without continuing on and building much of the now missing HS2 2a leg. Not to mention that the 2b leg isn’t going to go ahead.

Natural England are a statutory consultee for planning applications, so if they oppose the scheme there is a good chance it doesn’t go ahead. It’s crazy that a government can decide to build something only for other arms of the state to block it with a narrow focus only on one aspect.

I think the point of that article is more abstract than just the bat shed.

The issue is that, in this instance, government-in-the-form-of-HS2-Ltd has to negotiate an agreement between government-in-the-form-of-endangered-species-protection; government-in-the-form-of-local-planning-officers and government-in-the-form-of-the-treasury.

And the bat shed is just one example of something that happened over and over along the route.

In a less enlightened country, once the glorious leader had drawn a line on a map and ordered it to be built, no further approval would be required.

Loading gauge, not track gauge.

by far the most common method of public transport for commuting is by bus, which is why the Gov spent all that money subsidising bus fares in the last couple of years.

What's a better answer to freeing up WCML capacity?

Sort of a nit, but the parent says 18 trains/hour in each direction, which is actually 36 trains/hour total, vs 20 trains/hour if departures are every 3 minutes.

Additionally, it looks like Hiroshima station serves a few distinct lines (I see at least 3 separate branches about a mile east of the station ). So even 20 trains/hour may not be 20 trains/hour on one line.

The bits that have really cost have been going through the Cotswolds where local opposition has meant insane planning applications and eventually a decision to bury the lines in tunnels. It was totally unnecessary and could have gone above ground if we had a more sane planning system, something the new government has promised to at least try and change (I suspect they will fail…)

I suspect over-engineering and being allowed to generally spunk money up the wall was the main culprit.

The £100m bat shed isn't a sign to me of over-zealous environmentalists, it's a sign that the project was mismanaged because there wasn't enough pushback on spunking £100m up the wall with a mindset of "oh well, it's a big project, I guess £100m isn't much in the scheme of a project in the tens-of-billions things!.

> Firstly, the 'bat shed' (officially SWBMS) is expected to cost £100m. This is neither expensive nor wasteful for a structure nearly 1 kilometre long and "designed to accommodate up to 36 high-speed trains passing through the structure every hour of operation for 120 years, plus frequent conventional rail traffic in addition" as reported by Architects' Journal[1].

It might be good value for a 1km tunnel (or not, I don't know) but I think this argument misses the wood for the trees.

The main point is more "should we be spending £100m on a bat tunnel?"

i.e. What else could £100m of public money buy us, and would it be better than a 1km bat shed?

> The £100m bat shed isn't a sign to me of over-zealous environmentalists, it's a sign that the project was mismanaged because there wasn't enough pushback on spunking £100m up the wall with a mindset of "oh well, it's a big project, I guess £100m isn't much in the scheme of a project in the tens-of-billions things!.

The "£100m bat shed" is in the news precisely because the chair of HS2 brought it up. The point they're making is that something as fairly straightforward as an environmental protection structure is seized upon by a myriad of competing interests, all with their own demands and ability to block progress, which ultimately makes everything hugely expensive.

HS2 may well have a cost laissez-faire problem, but the bat shed is not evidence of it.

> i.e. What else could £100m of public money buy us, and would it be better than a 1km bat shed?

Can you think of anything?

It doesn't seem extraordinarily expensive given the cost of building anything these days, I'd question should the cost of building new things be so expensive, rather than should money be spent on this kind of project, because of all things to spend a large unit of money on, this does seem like a useful one.

Their foreign creditors presumably can't repossess the HSR lines and take them overseas, and the domestic creditors should be easy for the state to control. Maybe they'll pay back the money, maybe they won't. In the meantime and long after, the trains will run and generate real value for Chinese people and institutions.

There's a UK politics tradition called "kicking it into the long grass"

You've got a group of stakeholders who passionately believe X should be done. They've got some strong arguments, and some political backing. You've got another group of stakeholders who strongly think X should not be done. They've got some good arguments, and some powerful supporters.

So how do you resolve the debate? Which of the two groups are you going to upset? It's simple! You just delay the decision. Order a study, set up a committee, change the requirements, whatever. Just hold up any major works for 5 years or so without cancelling the project, and you can leave office making it some other chump's problem.

Nuclear power plant we might need, but it's expensive and nuclear? Long grass. Extra runway at a busy airport, but locals don't like it? Long grass. Decarbonising transport, but it'll raise prices? Long grass. Nuclear weapons renewal? Long grass. Incredibly busy road through a world heritage site? Long grass.

Britain already has one of the most expensive railways in the world.

> It doesn't seem extraordinarily expensive

but you don't need to build it at all

you could fund a lot of bat reserves in perpetuity with even 10% of that money

instead of a 1km long concrete box

The article suggests that the flexibility of route afforded by slower speeds would have reduced cost significantly.

18 per hour, that's one train every 3 minutes or so? Doesn't that seem overly excessive? Every 10 mins is probably more than enough, just make trains slightly longer to accommodate capacity and the logistics would be easier.

I was looking at London-Plymouth trains a few months back and the timetable was like once every 2 hours and the last one was at around 5 PM. I think going to maybe once an hour and more than like 3 trains per day would be a decent first improvement before trying something this ludicrous lol. Perfect is the enemy of good.

How about the NHS?

You keep making the assumption that the building has to be built at all, and that 200 million isn't unreasonable. It does not have to be and its for _bats_.

If we're a country at all we have to make joint efforts. That requires tax. We'll never agree about how much.

Lucky we don't currently have to fight a world war or endure any other serious kind of suffering.

The economic benefits of the bat tunnel are zero. It would be a shame if this rare bat lost some habitat but it is not an economic measure.

Oh, that was just one of the 4 Shinkansen platforms - together woth the normal lines the station has 14 platforms:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hiroshima_Station

In remember they even managed to somehow fit a small ramen restaurant on the island between platforms, complete with some seats at the counter. :)

Imo, as someone who lived in central London for 9 years with no car, the Uk puts ideology first oft n. Obsessed with trains. They are unreliable and expensive. Even the London Underground doesn’t pay for itself with tickets, needing subsidies from tax payers. It may be best to build wider roads and highways and everyone buy a car.

> take the government numbers with a huge grain of salt though

Large enough to make them unprofitable?

> Obsessed with trains. They are unreliable and expensive.

As a visitor, I've always experienced them as very reliable, extremely frequent, and very affordable compared to all alternatives.

> Even the London Underground doesn’t pay for itself with tickets, needing subsidies from tax payers.

Compared to roads, which are somehow self-funding? And that's not even considering all the other negative externalities of dense but car-centric cities.

> upgrade the speed and capacity of the WCML?

Do you really think that hasn’t already been tried. We’ve already spent billions upgrading the WCML, and endured decades of disruption (where do think the meme about bus replacement services comes from?).

There’s simply no getting away from the fact that the WCML is a hodgepodge of some of the world’s earliest rail lines glued together. Rail lines that when originally designed, steam was still the high technology, it would have been utterly inconceivable for the original builders to imagine 200mph electric trains then. The design of the WCML, from its alignment, radius of bends, size of tunnels, heights of bridges etc all reflect the century it was originally built in, which is over 200 years ago (the core part of the WCML

This is totally fine if you want to destroy foreign and indeed domestic investment. The China Railway Corporation has $859 billion in debt, twice that of Evergrande, which was a disaster.

The Chilterns, I think, and burying the line in tunnels was more or less necessary anyway. Some of the tunnels could technically probably have been replaced with cuttings, but apparently it would've cost more. The existing line used them mostly because tunneling was a lot harder back then. Mostly, the NIMBYs seem to have forced the existing tunnels to be longer than they need to be, which is expensive but not making building infrastructure in the country entirely non-viable levels of expensive.

Its fairly well known that China used these high speed rail developments to build itself out of the financial crisis, with dubious success of the resulting rail systems, and corresponding debt. This information is just a google away.

Still not a bad deal for China though.

This is wishful thinking at best.

The route is not expensive because of speed. The route is expensive because the powerful NIMBYs wanted a huge amount of it tunnelled. No amount of mild wigglyness leeway gets around that fact.

For all the howling, I've yet to see any specifics about how and where the route could have been changed if it were only built for 125mph running, and how that would have saved any significant cost.

I'm pretty sure the UK government knew all of this.

Rail privatization wasn't done with honest intentions. I'm sure the investors who got a stellar deal on the land around the stations when they cut up British rail and sold the pieces off were very well connected. It wasn't a mistake, it was corruption.

Thought I'd look up some hard data and wow, surprising.

In 2022 at least, a whopping 6% of commuting trips were by bus and 9% were by rail. Even less for leisure: 3% of leisure trips are by bus, 3% by rail.

Hardly seems worth all the hassle.

https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/transport-statistic...

Chart 4 is a summary of (domestic) travel modes and purposes.

Well I'll only repeat what's said in the article: "Christian Wolmar told CNN Travel ... the route could have followed existing highway corridors.”

Unnecessarily high speeds to show up the Continental duffers raised costs exponentially, then every Tory rural constituency claiming the line would disfigure their pristine arcadia had to be appeased with hugely expensive tunnels. But HS2 Ltd was also incredibly mismanaged. They made sure to rule out the manager of HS1 (successfully delivered under budget) as he would stop the gravy train (pun intended).

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/hs2-rishi-sun...

This was confirmed independently to me by a fellow alumni who worked on the project.

I don’t live in London but have traveled for work weeks at a time. Coming from a car focused area, I think this sentiment is surprising. I think the London Underground is one of the best things about London and preferring to widen roads and highways sounds extremely backwards for me who lived in a very car focused area. I don’t think it’s appreciated just how great the underground is compared to other transport systems around the world.

Drivers and residents pay additional taxes to maintain roads and pay for their own cars. You can’t get tax payers to maintain your own car.

Seems like it'd need to be more than slightly longer to accommodate capacity with a two-thirds reduction in train frequency.

I’ve lived both, car centric US/Canada and London. At first public transport seems great but over time the realization sets in about how uncomfortable it is (no seat warmers, cleanliness, having your face in people’s armpits) and inconvenient it is (not door to door) and that wouldn’t be so bad but then the unreliability (signal issues) and expense of the tickets and tax subsidies makes it a bad deal. It should exist as an option, I’m glad it does so I can have less traffic on the roads, but it’s overrated. HS2 in the article is this expensive just to build, imagine the maintenance costs for the next century. Whether you use it or not, residents will have to pay for it.

Not telling potential contract bidders what the value of each contract is and then being surprised when they bid at that value.

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/hs2-rishi-sun...

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2016/jun/07/hs2-the-zomb...

> Mr Holden also said HS1 was successful because the true budget was known to just “a handful of people”, while HS2 contractors inflated their prices once they saw the latter project’s true budget.

You seem to be answering a different question.

> Even the London Underground doesn’t pay for itself with tickets

TfL runs at a profit from its fares.

https://tfl.gov.uk/info-for/media/press-releases/2023/march/...

Wow. That is a shocking number. Do you have any interesting reading material on the indebtedness of Chinese railways?

Is the system unitary, e.g. the owner of the track also owns all the trains? Or is there a competition?

Westminster burning down again would be high irony.

(The current building was erected after a devastating fire in 1834, caused by improper disposal of ancient tally sticks no less.)

>It’s crazy that a government can decide to build something only for other arms of the state to block it with a narrow focus only on one aspect.

Why is that crazy? It seems like a fairly standard way of operating in democratic nations, so it must have some benefit. Separation of incentives, pooling of expert knowledge, ability to apply rules evenly to state and private development?

I say again, we can either have a social democracy where we decide what the rule of law is with a plebiscite or we can have a libertarian rights based society where whoever has capital can decide what happens and no one can stop them.

If we run things based on voting then part of that is accepting that other people don't agree with you about what is and isn't a priority. They like their quiet lives and there are enough of them to influence elections.

Why should I pay taxes (as a resident non-driver) for somebody else's car if they don't pay taxes for the train I much prefer to use?

They do. That’s my point. Train riders are subsidized. Car drivers are not

Nobody has to accept anything. We get to debate about it and try to convince each other. We don't vote for things but for governments and there's always more than one issue to consider so government decisions are always going to be a compromise. In the end they get kicked out if the whole thing ends up not working but if it does then the majority give them another go.

I live close to the line so drive past most days. They have been building a bridge over where the track will run (no track at all yet) for 5 years. Oh and the bridge a little further up they built in wrong place so had to remove it and start again. So yeah this is the level of speed and quality we will see.

The linked PDF claims 3 trains per hour from London to Birmingham, not 18.

"Three trains per hour from London to each of Birmingham, Manchester and Leeds"

It says "Up to 18 trains per hour would run in each direction between London and the UK’s major cities" but that's from London to several cities.

https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/5a82b56740f0b...

That kind of frequency is not unusual in the Netherlands for normal trains during rush hour. Unfortunately trains need a minimum distance from eachother and building new tracks is impossible because they go straight through some of the most expensive real estate in the country.

> Can you think of anything?

Yes, lots! £100m could give a hospital a substantial renovation for example.

3 minutes frequency vs 10 minute frequency is the difference of potentially 6 minutes of variance and 20 minutes of variance in 2-way commute time.

Actually there aren't. Take all the votes from people who live in the cities and they overrule the country folk. The Americans had to invent the electoral college because otherwise New York and California would run the nation.

This is a hilarious but also somewhat enlightening article.

Do you really believe that all car-related costs to society are completely paid for by car-related taxes and fees?

> 18 per hour, that's one train every 3 minutes or so? Doesn't that seem overly excessive?

No, that sounds pretty normal. You've built the train line and the stations which is the expensive part, it would be a waste not to use it to full capacity.

> Every 10 mins is probably more than enough, just make trains slightly longer to accommodate capacity

It really isn't. You'd need to operate, what, 40-coach trains to match capacity, which would mean massive amounts of station rebuilding. Think of how much you'd have to demolish to extend Euston to accommodate that.

> I was looking at London-Plymouth trains a few months back and the timetable was like once every 2 hours and the last one was at around 5 PM. I think going to maybe once an hour and more than like 3 trains per day would be a decent first improvement before trying something this ludicrous lol. Perfect is the enemy of good.

Plymouth's urban population is literally 1/10th that of Birmingham, and travel need scales superlinearly.

> Or does a 75mph freight railway cost as much as a 250mph passenger railway?

No, it costs more. The most expensive part of building anything in the UK, by far, is getting it through the local planning process, and as hard as that is with a sexy passenger railway that local residents can see a direct benefit from, it's much harder for a freight railway. Also freight railways need a much flatter route, which makes the route more constrained (increasing planning costs) and means more need for bridges and tunnels (increasing everything costs).

You need to brush up on your UK geography; the trains to Manchester and Leeds would obviously stop at Birmingham on the way.

The Shinkansen runs the fastest Nozomi service about every ten minutes throughout the day at around 5 trains per hour on the most popular routes like Tokyo to Osaka, then during peak hours there's another 5 added in on top of that as well. Plus there are some other slower, cheaper services that run as well and some trains will be express an others stop at more stops or go to further destinations and so on.

I think altogether they probably come to one train every 3 minutes during peak times, but they are not all the same trains and don't all go to the same place and stop at the same stops. There is generally about one train every 10 minutes per platform at a station in my experience, but of course there are usually well over 20 platforms per big station, it's not like there is one platform with a train stopping every three minutes.

> Sorry but for some ballance, the current prime minister stood in parliament and opposed the entire HS2 project "on cost and merit" and voted against the project in 2016. He said "the only sensible plan is to abandon the project altogether".

That 2016 vote was the decision. Yes and no were both valid answers at that point ("no" was a bad one, but a defensible one). The subsequent dicking about is a whole lot worse than either.

> you could fund a lot of bat reserves in perpetuity with even 10% of that money

Ya but funding bat reserves has nothing to do with a long concrete box, unless it also literally is a bat reserve. The money for the bats can come from the bat fund, and the concrete box should be able to come from the concrete box fund, if there's not enough for both, figure out which one is more impactful for the people paying the taxes and persuade them to let you save the bats, or let them do it through personal acts of charity.

> The Shinkansen runs the fastest Nozomi service about every ten minutes throughout the day at around 5 trains per hour on the most popular routes like Tokyo to Osaka, then during peak hours there's another 5 added in on top of that as well.

Your numbers are out of date. The current timetable is 16 trains per hour per direction (12 Nozomi and 4 slower services that stop at more stations) on a single line - some go further than others but they're all going to the same places at least as far as Nagoya (and all but one go to Osaka).

> There is generally about one train every 10 minutes per platform at a station in my experience, but of course there are usually well over 20 platforms per big station, it's not like there is one platform with a train stopping every three minutes.

The stations have multiple platform faces connected to the same line, even intermediate ones, but in general it's a two-track line, one up, one down.

The connection from London to Exeter is better. From Plymouth to Exeter the line runs right along the coast and they don't seem to be able to improve the capacity or speed.

The HS2 money would probably be better spent fixing bottlenecks like that to improve the overall capacity, not just to put so many trains between London and Birmingham.

This is a complete fallacy. Car owners might pay for their cars but the annual emissions tax doesn't come close to covering the cost of roads and their infrastructure.

Road transport is subsidised to a far larger extent than rail travel is.

>This would have made Birmingham a suburb of London, as you can just go to the train station and hop on the next train

At the moment you can just pop to Euston and jump on a train, a few per hour, taking 1hr18m. The problem for most people though is, were I to do so now, a single is £94 which is quite steep for most people. In actual london suburbs you can hop on a train which takes like 20-60 mins and the big difference is the fare is more like £5.

If the designers were building what the customers want I think they'd go for something cheaper. The design seems to suffer from it being government money so it's free so what's another £50bn?

The £100m bat cover is quite impressive https://archive.ph/HLQD0 They reasoned there are bats nearby and they might fly into the trains, I guess bats not being very good at hearing things coming, and so better build a roof over the tracks if any may be around.

I hadn't caught the part of the article (thanks alcohol ads) that did describe literally building a 1KM long "bat shed" with no evidence whatsoever that was necessary, (although I'd argue these bureaucracys often tend to get lost in spending the same amount on studies deciding whether something is worth it) The proposition seemed so unrelated and absurd that I thought it had to be hypothetical, and for this I'm deeply sorry lol this is so emblematic of Britain

Also their passenger capacity because there isn't such a mix of faster and stopping trains.

They already tried upgrading WCML at massive disruption over years and the gains weren't particularly much.

It was realised that new track was the way to go.

Ya I was off the mark, didn't read the bit about it actually being a bat thing, seems absurd.

You’re making a somewhat classic correlation = causation mistake here. I.e. because most people use cars, they must prefer cars over alternatives.

In reality a big part of why people use cars is because there isn't a practical alternative, because we either haven’t built it, or we tore it down in the 70s/80s. There was a period where the UK government honestly thought that public transport was going to cease existing, and be replaced by private cars. The decades since have clearly demonstrated why that isn’t true, as usage of public transport has grown year-on-year despite chronic underfunding, and the slow dismantling of services.

> tax subsidies makes it a bad deal.

Unlike roads? How exactly do you think roads are paid for, if not by 100% tax subsidies? TfL doesn’t get any tax subsidies anyway, the Tories got rid of that years ago.

> imagine the maintenance costs for the next century. Whether you use it or not, residents will have to pay for it.

And somehow this doesn’t apply to roads?