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

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...

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.

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

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.

> 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.

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.

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.

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.

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. :)

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.

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

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.

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.

> 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.

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.

> 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 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.

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