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...
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.
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...
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!.
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" 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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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?
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).
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.