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Deleted, too much bile.
The north was promised direct trains to Paris via ECML and HS1, still waiting.
I'm still of the opinion its highly unlikely any high speed trains will actually ever run on it in anythig like the formpromised - and the governments own watchdog seems to agree
HS2 is officially ‘unachievable’ after being given red rating
Problems with first two phases, from London to Birmingham and then to Crewe, ‘do not appear to be resolvable’
Ah, was just coming to unearth this thread again but beaten to it!
Yep - one long list of cock ups and ineptitude. This Government can't do major projects, it's just a catalogue of stupidity and short-termism. No ambition, no ability, no long-term thought. Useless cretins.
I'm more cynical - its just a vehicle to pump money to their pals. there was never any intention to take it north of Birmingham in any case - that was obvious from the start.
the only sensible way would have been to build it from the north to the south. Same money spent on lines between Scotland Manchester and birmingham would have created much more benefit for many more people and they would not have cancelled a southern extension
During the time this farce has been going on in Scotland we have reopened several old closed lines, electrified one of the main lines and upgraded stations. I know its much easier but even so - it shows that infrastructure can be done with clear aims.
Don't worry Rishi is going to solve transportation issues by reviewing LTNs, it's all in good hands folks...
Electrifying the existing network has surely got to be a priority?
I'm not going to argue on the validity of HS2. I think the UK does need it if you have serious aspirations to move freight and people round the country , and yes, the London bit needs doing. It doesn't mean other stuff hasn't been neglected though.
What's interesting and worrying is it seems the UK cannot manage infrastructure projects anymore. The country needs to relearn how to do them as the knowledge apparently isn't there or is forgotten.
You only have to look at how shoddily the current government have treated Eurostar to see how little they think of rail travel.
Apparently a large part of the current problem has been a reticence to spend the money on getting things done, instead putting them off which has caused costs to spiral.
England cannot manage infrastructure projects. We have up here.
Crossrail? has that worked ok? I know it sucked up huge amounts of money.
We have up here.
How are the ferries?
A9 dualling?
A96 dualling?
Rest and be thankful?
That report just confirms what anyone with anything between their ears has been saying about this monstrous white elephant from day one
It’s just going to end up as a £150 billion+ commuter line from Birmingham to somewhere in the general vicinity of London, probably some time around 2050
The whole sorry thing should never have been started in the first place and now nobody has got the bollocks to do the obvious and scrap the whole shambolic mess, because they’re in the thrall of consultants and all their mates are on the multibillion pound gravy train
So they’ll just carry on throwing tens of billions of taxpayers money at the huge pointless money pit, while every other transport project around the UK is downgraded or scrapped altogether to cover the ballooning costs
Cost of Euston HS2 terminus could race past £4.8bn estimate, MPs say
Cup half empty again? 🙂 Borders railway, Queensferry crossing, bathgate line. Even the ruddy Edinburgh trams are now in operation and working well
Are there problems with the dualling thats been done on the A9? The main issue was there all the money got spent on the Edinburgh trams so progress is slower - but not because of idiocy ( unless you count the trams as that) but just slower than most of us would have liked
OK its not perfect and anything can be cocked up - and the ferries fiasco is a disgrace
Crossrail? has that worked ok? I know it sucked up huge amounts of money.
Yes and no - it HAS worked, but rather too well. Result being that some of the interchange stations are getting a bit "oops we should have made this bigger..." already.
The utter stupidity of ending HS2 at Old Oak Common and relying on an interchange there with CrossRail while they build the "we're still debating how many platforms it should have" Euston isn't going to help matters on CrossRail either.
But yes, as a general principle, CrossRail shows how, if you actually properly invest in something and build it to plan, it pays off almost immediately. The latest figures I saw was the CrossRail now accounts for 1 in every 6 rail journeys in London (it's counted as a railway, not a Tube line, so ridership on the Underground isn't included in that figure).
Well… it is, isn’t it?
Because every other piece of rail infrastructure has been binned so that the black hole that is HS2 can suck in all the funding.
Remember that we were promised massive rail investment by a certain Mr G Osbourne as part of the Northerrn Powerhouse fairy tale. All of canned once HS2 was given the go ahead
Don’t worry Rishi is going to solve transportation issues by reviewing LTNs, it’s all in good hands folks…
Electrifying the existing network has surely got to be a priority?
You’d think; the GWR London to Bristol main line has been electrified as far as Swindon, then goes onto another line across to Bristol Parkway. The section that runs on through Chippenham and Bath to Bristol had a huge amount of money spent, Box Tunnel had the entire railbed lowered to allow the wires to run along the roof, and the trains run through with the pantographs raised, all the road bridges had to be raised, causing major inconvenience for locals due to road closures, station canopies and footbridges had to be raised. The scaffolding that carries the high-voltage lines stops at Chippenham, the work stopped two years or so ago, and no sign of any further construction being carried out since. We get the s****y new trains, and they are really nice to travel on, but they’re diesel powered on our stretch from Swindon, the rail company had to buy hybrid trains to allow any to use the last section, otherwise they’d have to use old InterCity 125’s!
I wonder why the work has stopped?
As a wider thing, there's 244 projects in the full Major Projects Portfolio and 23 are rated red/unachievable. How in hell do you have 1/10th of all of your most important projects this broken? You'd hope HS2 is exceptional but it only really stands out for the enormous amount that was sunk into it and the irreversible damage done before they finally admitted the wheels had come off. Go back to 2019 and there were only 4 rated red.
That's actually a slight decrease on red projects since last year (though the biggest one to leave red was just quietly changed to "exempt" rather than actually improving) but despite that, the amount of money tied up in the currently unachievable projects has soared from £62.5 billion to £94 billion in just one year. But of course "there's no money". The cost of the total portfolio is up to £805bn, which in itself is no bad thing but this tells us that of the £127bn in new spending authorised, a quarter was poured directly into the 23 failing ones. And again that avoids the "exempt" ones of which at least a couple are equally massive money pits and directly related to red ones. "too big to fail" and vanity projects rule.
In fairness it should be said that Crossrail was in red for a couple of years, and came through, Red projects aren't always doomed. OTOH the Dreadnought project is inexplicably yellow even though the project to build the reactors for the subs is red, so apparently those are going to be sail powered or something.
I just don't understand why the Kent Eurostar terminals haven't been reopened? Surely they were profitable pre-covid, and the demand is back again now? Two international stations just sat there moth-balled!You only have to look at how shoddily the current government have treated Eurostar to see how little they think of rail travel.
But yes, as a general principle, CrossRail shows how, if you actually properly invest in something and build it to plan
Crossrail is entirely in London hence proper funding.
I read that crossrail took more money than every other transport infrastructure project uk wide addesd together. No idea how true that is
You’d think; the GWR London to Bristol main line has been electrified as far as Swindon, then goes onto another line across to Bristol Parkway. The section that runs on through Chippenham and Bath to Bristol had a huge amount of money spent, Box Tunnel had the entire railbed lowered to allow the wires to run along the roof, and the trains run through with the pantographs raised, all the road bridges had to be raised, causing major inconvenience for locals due to road closures, station canopies and footbridges had to be raised. The scaffolding that carries the high-voltage lines stops at Chippenham, the work stopped two years or so ago, and no sign of any further construction being carried out since. We get the s****y new trains, and they are really nice to travel on, but they’re diesel powered on our stretch from Swindon, the rail company had to buy hybrid trains to allow any to use the last section, otherwise they’d have to use old InterCity 125’s!
I wonder why the work has stopped?
It's the same on the Welsh end of that project. Massive cost and inconvenience to raise bridges, lower trackbeds and put in the cables all the way to Cardiff but not bother to do anything further West. It's pretty much diesels that run the line as almost all of the trains go to Swansea and beyond but with no electric feed they pretty much just run on diesel the whole way from the Severn Tunnel. I live right by the line and the trains stop beside my estate when waiting for safe passage west through the main Cardiff stations, always have the diesel generators running and have only once seen a hybrid train with it's pickups extended. I sometimes doubt if the cables have even been switched on.
Apparently a large part of the current problem has been a reticence to spend the money on getting things done, instead putting them off which has caused costs to spiral.
We've had this with the A470 Dualling Project. It was originally funded via the ERDF (European Regional Development Fund) with matched funding via Westminster and the Welsh Assembly. Since we voted to leave Westminster made a commitment to match the lost funding for the last three phases but they have massively dragged their feet so work is progressing a lot slower than it should. The Welsh Assembly are essentially paying for it wholesale, easily doubling their commitment costs. This has been sucked from other budgets and I fear Westminster are using it as a political football so as to make Labour look bad, same as we didn't get an increase in out NHS portion of funding during the Pandemic.
I read that crossrail took more money than every other transport infrastructure project uk wide addesd together. No idea how true that is
CrossRail was about 3.5 years late and £4bn over-budget (some of that down to Covid) with a total cost of £18.8bn.
The CrossRail Bill was put to Parliament in 2005, the CrossRail Act (granting permission to build) was 2008 so it's been basically 20 years which is sort of the timeline you're working on with things like this. It was certainly on the cards for many years (decades actually!) before that in one form or another as an idea, a tangible plan, a "we've got the seed of a decent plan and have protected some of our proposed route" phase and so on.
Work started in 2009 so maybe 13 years from first work to open. £18.8bn / 13 years = £1.45bn per year. Not bad going really given that you're tunneling directly underneath one of the busiest cities in the world which already has a maze of Underground lines, sewers, utilities and God only knows what sort of archaeological remains down there.
That cost includes all the new stations, the trains, the infrastructure, signalling and so on.
RIS 2 - the Roads Investment Strategy covering 2020 - 2025 has £27.4bn earmarked for it but the utterly useless National Highways has overspent and underbuilt so far and has already had to add a further £1.9bn in contingency costs. Call it £30bn - over a 5 year period.
Yeah, CrossRail suddenly looks good value for money doesn't it?! Roads are rubbish VfM and National Highways manage to make it even worse VfM by ****ing up everything they touch. For example:
https://www.newcivilengineer.com/latest/how-national-highways-bridge-infilling-saga-played-out-20-06-2022/
The thing with Roads though is that it's all very piecemeal. £1bn here, £500m there... it all just sort of trickles through with no real notion of the overall cost. A single motorway junction upgrade has near zero wider benefits - all it does is fix that ONE junction. No benefit to anyone else. But that'll be £350m.
https://nationalhighways.co.uk/our-roads/south-east/m25-junction-10/
CrossRail has vastly wider benefits across a huge swathe of London. Plus it's paying for itself, people pay to travel on it. Driving... well road tax hasn't gone up, no-one is paying for it (directly). There's some rather intangible stuff around "easing congestion" but that ignores the induced demand, extra carbon emissions and loss of habitat that is baked into it and that is repeated across every single "road upgrade" project.
How long will it take for crossrail to pay for itself.?
What really got me about it was when it started they tried to claim it was uk strategic spending so scotland would not get the barnet consequentials fortunately i believe that was changed. London just hoovers up far more than its share of government spending. Londoners are the real subsidy junkies🙄🤣
Londoners are the real subsidy junkies
Yes but they have a transport system that works. TfL (for all its faults) is one of the best in the world, mostly because it's not run by the Government.
And there's nothing wrong with public subsidy for a public service. Public transport benefits EVERYONE. Even if I never take a Tube or bus and drive everywhere, the Tube and bus services mean the roads are freer for me to drive on. Even if I never cycle, the cycle hire scheme and cycle lanes ensure that many of the people who can cycle are not clogging up the bus and Tube or are not clogging up the roads by driving.
It absolutely needs to be subsidised.
How long will it take for crossrail to pay for itself.?
In terms of ticket fares alone or in terms of land-value increase, stamp duty increase etc? It's more complicated than saying: it cost x to build, a ticket costs y, therefore you need to sell [insert wildly high number of tickets] to pay for the construction costs.
Plus it ignores things like running costs, maintenance etc.
My point still stands - it needs subsidy to cover that because it's a wider benefit to society.
Of benefit to londoners you mean?🙄😜
No benefit to the rest of the country indeed it is a detriment as there is less money for everyone else. Pacers in the north. State of the art in london
Borders railway, Queensferry crossing, bathgate line. Even the ruddy Edinburgh trams
Borders railway - for commuters to Edinburgh
Queensferry crossing - for commuters to Edinburgh
Bathgate line - for commuters to Edinburgh
Edinburgh trams - for commuters in Edinburgh
No benefit to the rest of the country indeed it is a detriment as there is less money for everyone else
Crossrail 2 is going to happen though, everything else can wait.
Good point well presented Scotroutes 🙂 a tad unfair - it also helps fifers, weegies and airdrionians escape thier grim lives
Scotroutes. I do not know what you are complaining about anyway. You got a lovely new train up your local mountain and its been refurbished already. No expense spared! Nothings too good for our highland brethren
*runs away*
Crossrail was originally proposed in the 1940s. The need for Crossrail 1 (& 2 &3!) was identified in the London Rail Study in the 1970s, so it’s only taken 75 years to get sorted. It is also already the busiest rail line in the entire country, and still London commuters have to deal with the majority of the most overcrowded rail services in the UK.
However none of this means that there shouldn’t be proper funding for rail in the north and Scotland. Or that HS2 shouldn’t be completed properly, from London Euston to Birmingham, Leeds, Manchester and on to Edinburgh, plus a proper link to HS1 and the continent.
Unfortunately all of that relies on a government brave enough to actually try and explain the benefits of appropriate infrastructure spending, and public transport, as well as to contextualise how much we’ve spent over the years building roads and subsidising motorists. It’s much easier to just stir up resentment and try and divide people by making out that some other group is getting it much better than them.
London is getting it much better than the rest of the country.
HS2 was poorly designed from the outset- too London centric and not ambitious enough. But even this myopic design and case for building would have been bearable if the plan was to start from the top.
People just go off their own experiences with public transport.
The rail infrastructure in the North of England is just an utter and complete shambolic mess and everyone knows that theres no way on earth you could rely on it to get you to work and back every day. You'd have to be out of your mind to even attempt it. You wouldn't be in your job for very long, thats for sure.
The government seem completely indifferent to this situation, which is why there is such resentment at the hundreds of billions being ploughed into London transport and this ridiculous white elephant of a commuter line from Birmingham to London that we all knew would never go to Manchester or Leeds.
Remember that this whole debacle was sold on the principle of benefitting the north, yet ultimately it'll just further disenfranchise us at an absolutely enormous and totally unjustifiable cost
Remember that this whole debacle was sold on the principle of benefitting the north, yet ultimately it’ll just further disenfranchise us at an absolutely enormous and totally unjustifiable cost
Done properly, it would have done.
Two new high-speed lines, one east, one west. They didn't need to be as high speed as planned, that's insane to try going faster than TGV in half the space but some moron high up will have thought it sounded good.
Link that in with a new higher-speed east-west line across the Pennines (sort of CrossRail for the North if you like) to connect up the woefully disconnected cities like Bradford in the middle plus some of the stuff out towards Liverpool and with future options to run into North Wales and up to Scotland.
In doing that you get to remodel the horrendous mess at Manchester and Leeds, both of which export all their delays around the entire North of England. And you leave in place the stopper services catering for all the villages which now no longer have to mix track with faster "express" services.
It could all have worked. Yes, it would have been overbudget, everything is. Not helped by Brexit, inflation etc. If we'd have got the Chinese to build it, the railway would be running by now.
Same in defence, NHS and other multi-national massive schemes: poor project management, political posturing around cost and efficiencies, regular "reviews" which then come back with "oh we'll change x, y and z to cut costs" and then they wonder why costs have doubled and it's because the entire project and timelines needed re-scoping. Every other country with high speed rail is looking at us and laughing.
Do you really believe there was ever any intent to"do it properly"? IMO that would have meant doing the north of england stuff first and working south and a rebuild / new rolling stock on the west coast mainline to Glasgow - east coast already runs at 100+ mph with decent rolling stock
Do you really believe there was ever any intent to”do it properly”?
I believe the intent was there, yes.
I was a lot closer to the Northern Powerhouse Rail proposals than I was to HS2 but NPR was all designed to link in, there was a huge amount of engagement, resource and work went into designing the NPR phase of things.
And then it met reality.
A whole mix of (in no particular order): NIMBYs, environmentalists, politicians of all colours who jumped on a bandwagon to support/oppose, the media banging on with "we could spend that money on [anything other than a railway]", Brexit, spiralling inflation, incompetence, probably some corruption in there as well (lets face it, it's the Tories), Covid, cost-cutting exercises and poor marketing.
As a wider thing, there’s 244 projects in the full Major Projects Portfolio and 23 are rated red/unachievable. How in hell do you have 1/10th of all of your most important projects this broken? You’d hope HS2 is exceptional but it only really stands out for the enormous amount that was sunk into it and the irreversible damage done before they finally admitted the wheels had come off. Go back to 2019 and there were only 4 rated red.
Having worked in and around public sector projects (nothing involving rail/roads or as big as HS2 admittedly) I would suggest that the public sector has the ability to deliver big projects, but this has been severely eroded over the last couple of decades from cuts that mean the best people have moved to the private sector (or do not consider the public sector as a career at all), the constant drive to reduce costs meaning that delays and reviews are everpresent (and mean counter intuitively that costs can rise as work is delayed, external consultants are brought in with their own bright ideas, and then political leadership changes or moves to the next shiny thing).
It then becomes self supporting - 'public sector can't delver big projects' so scrutiny increases, and the good people go elsewhere.
TBF looking at a few of the big ones it's not the capability to deliver projects that's really the issue, it's mostly projects that were badly approached from the get-go, and things that were really set up to fail or which if they'd been approached honestly would never have got off the ground. HS2 is a good example of that, there's only so much the management of the project can do when the costing is basically made up just to get it approved, the scale of the project is poorly defined and constantly changing, and when "uh it turns out that building stuff in London is expensive" and "we'll save money by pausing it til after the next election so actually it'll be more expensive but we can blame the next guy" and so on. The big failures all come right from the start. And pretty much all the big defence contracts are designed to go overbudget- because that's just politically easier and "better" than being honest about the price.
And of course, almost nothing is really "public sector" anyway, everything's a mix, we just blame the public sector when the private sector contractor says "we need more money and it'll be 10 years late"- but it's all just the same game, contracts negotiated with the foreknowledge that you can renegotiate later.
and a rebuild / new rolling stock on the west coast mainline to Glasgow – east coast already runs at 100+ mph with decent rolling stock
Err, the WCML is passed for 125mph where possible, the stock is still in good condition, approaching its half life, and is undergoing a refurb, as its getting tired on the inside of the passenger vehicles. The diesels (Voyagers) are being replaced soon, their successors are being delivered now. You cant blame the rolling stock for any deficiencies , it’s very reliable, and there’s enough of it.
Ta alanl - you can tell its a while since I was last on the WCML and a pal was on it recently and said it was old shonky rolling stock
im just pulling out of Euston now, the HS2 works are enormous - several 100 metres of development running through Camden, huge piles been sunk, mind boggling that they
a) are not sure what the station will look like
b) cant even confirm that the line will now go that far
the sunk costs are huge , the disruption in Camden and around the station enormous
its on pause but theres still plenty of work going on there
The North should see HS rail by about 2099 at this rate
Remember the channel tunnel when they started at both ends and met in the middle? Why wasn't that the case here?
@tjagain the Scottish projects you listed, although now complete, were badly mismanaged.
I know a very good surveyor who only lasted a couple months on the Tram project, as he couldn't stand the level of mismanagement.
And I know off a project manager who was pretty much bribed back out of retirement to get a handle on the Bathgate electrification project, as it was going so badly.
The general theme is public bodies cannot manage big projects.
The people they seem to employ either just can't do the job, and/or won't take responsibility for anything, and there seems to be no accountability.
Can't get Saturday night's planned job done, which has been in the planning for 3 months, because somebody forgot to order the brackets crucial to getting the job done? Don't worry about, just pay the guys to stand around doing nothing, and plan another rail closure.
(the afore mentioned manager turned up at an engineering firm I know on the Tuesday, asking if they could make the brackets before Saturday, otherwise the closure would have cost 6 figures for absolutely nothing being achieved. And that was apparently a common theme, with nobody being accountable for crucial parts being ready for planned jobs)
Then there is awarding tenders to companies that put that many clauses in their bid, they never finish a single job for the initial price.
The tender/bidding issue affected one of my brother's main customers. One of their competitors were bidding on railway jobs at pretty much material cost only, so their headline bid was well below all the other suppliers, but then once the jobs started, there would be a list of 'issues' found that drove up the final cost to well beyond the other suppliers final price.
As a wider thing, there’s 244 projects in the full Major Projects Portfolio and 23 are rated red/unachievable. How in hell do you have 1/10th of all of your most important projects this broken? You’d hope HS2 is exceptional but it only really stands out for the enormous amount that was sunk into it and the irreversible damage done before they finally admitted the wheels had come off. Go back to 2019 and there were only 4 rated red.
Having worked in and around public sector projects (nothing involving rail/roads or as big as HS2 admittedly) I would suggest that the public sector has the ability to deliver big projects, but this has been severely eroded over the last couple of decades from cuts that mean the best people have moved to the private sector (or do not consider the public sector as a career at all), the constant drive to reduce costs meaning that delays and reviews are everpresent (and mean counter intuitively that costs can rise as work is delayed, external consultants are brought in with their own bright ideas, and then political leadership changes or moves to the next shiny thing).It then becomes self supporting – ‘public sector can’t delver big projects’ so scrutiny increases, and the good people go elsewhere.
Having worked on a few myself i always see the budget being well underpriced at the beginning, it's all a game, they keep it under a certain number to make it viable to go through initial appraisal and gates, then it suddenly starts creeping up in cost, i see a few projects that are always stated as being 'over budget', but the reality is they are pretty much standard cost for what you're getting, and the support package through life.
A lot of the 'red' projects are more than likely down to budgets being moved (projects frozen for a period), they're at a very early technical readiness, so risk is way over estimated and costed against unknowns, or known unknowns and so on.
This lot really do foul everything they touch, don't they?
matt_outandaboutFull Member
Looks like no HS2 to Manchesterhttps://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-66813734/blockquote >
Well no one could possibly have foreseen that! 🙄
Londoners are the real subsidy junkies
Straight out of the Big TJ Book of Facts, that one! Have a look at the "Net Fiscal Balance" chart.
https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/cbp-8027/
Somethinģ something Westminster Holyrood Motorhome something folks...