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

(www.cnn.com)
61 points peutetre | 4 comments | 20 Nov 24 13:51 UTC | HN request time: 0.001s | source
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prennert ◴[20 Nov 24 16:05 UTC] No.42195212[source]▶
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...

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m4rtink ◴[20 Nov 24 16:18 UTC] No.42195405[source]▶
Thats a normal Shinkansen fregvency on busier stations - saw departures every 3 minutes in Hiroshima station. :)
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1. prennert ◴[20 Nov 24 16:38 UTC] No.42195654[source]▶
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.

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2. masklinn ◴[20 Nov 24 17:01 UTC] No.42195914[source]▶
> 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.

3. m4rtink ◴[20 Nov 24 17:16 UTC] No.42196093[source]▶
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.

4. pydry ◴[20 Nov 24 18:37 UTC] No.42196842[source]▶
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.