HS2 spiralling costs

Terrible scandal. **** em all 😡

I think there are several points:

Major infrastructure is expensive
If you delay part of it to save money, you don’t realise all the benefits, and it costs more in the long run
One motorway junction can cost upwards of £300m…

Cruising around London again for a couple of days
Thameslink ✅
Elizabeth ✅
DLR ✅
Stratford interchange ✅
I haven’t been to new £700M Bank Station

Only shining light outside of London is the communist LNER that took me there.

Why oh why is this so difficult outside of London?

Well at least we’re not having a tunnel/elevated train line into Manchester. Wasn’t really going to happen anyway. Andy B’s going to be raving mad.

Why oh why is this so difficult outside of London?

its not – its just london based politicians will throw money at london

I believe London gets x2.5 more spending per person.

CBA to fact check this so assuming it’s true it does need countering with 2 points.
1) Unlike any other part of the UK London wouldn’t function without public transport. It’s too dense, which means a lot of people couldn’t park a car if they wanted one anyway. A it of a chicken Vs egg, but it is what it is.
2) As per Scuttler’s post, it’s all concentrated on the center anyway. It looks/feels great as a tourist being able to hop on/off the tube and seemingly get anywhere you need to be. What you don’t realise is that from Paddington you can probably walk to 8 tube stations in 5 minutes. Conversely getting from Stamford Bridge to Tower Bridge feels like you’re on the tube forever (it’s about half an hour to do 6 miles).

To illustrate this:
Further out if you pick somewhere that a non-Londoner would consider to be London (remember the TfL maps famously aren’t to scale) It’s still pretty rubbish if you want to get from say Staines to Canary Wharf.

28miles
110minutues by car
66minutes by train

Preston to Manchester on the other hand
35 miles
67 minutes by car
37 minutes by train

I think the focus should be on ‘how can we make this happen’, rather than ‘how can we save money’. It’s like everyone in the UK has no concern for anything beyond their own front door. So frustrating.

I’m not sure how much has actually been spent and what is legally liable right now, but what about just binning it altogether? The maths to justify it in the first place were a joke which no commercial organisation would have passed, and from then on no one has had the balls to simply stop the spending (sunk cost fallacy). Surely an upgraded Trans Pennine route would have far superior cost-benefits.

The upgraded Transpennine route is happening. There was some suggestion about it all being upgraded to W12 loading gauge as well as electrified (I’m not clear if this will allow double-deck trains or not) but I suspect that will be spendy.

no commercial organisation would have passed

Commercial organisations have little regard for the externalities (both costs and benefits) of national infrastructure projects.

as well as electrified

🤣

How many times have we heard that?

its not – its just london based politicians will throw money at london

1) the population of greater london is 50% larger than the whole of Scotland. 70% of Scotlands population lives in the Central Belt.

2) Thameslink is Peterborough to Brighton – three times as far from Edinburgh to Glasgow. Elizabeth Line is Reading to Shenfield – twice as far as Edinburgh to Glasgow. They’re not “in London” any more than the ECML is “in Scotland”.

3) Transport is a reserved power in Scotland. Scotland gets 117% of the UK per capita budget to spend how it likes. England gets 97% of the UK per capita budget…

If you want to moan about underinvestment in public transport in Scotland, go and ask your friends in the SNP!

(Cue more moaning about how it’s all London’s fault)

We’re too far in to bin it now. Half the route (london-brum) has been bought + dug out! What’s the alternative? More cars – that would be worse. At least if LON-BIR is done, the rest can potentially be added later.
Plus, ‘the money is better spent elsewhere’ assumes those projects would be managed more effectively. I’m not sure that would be so.

The Big British Castle news states;

the delay will primarily affect sections from Manchester to Crewe and Birmingham to Crewe.

when the truth is “anything north of Brum”

An utter white elephant from the get-go. Billions spent to save 15 minutes London to Manchester? Madness.

I think the biggest expenditure has been on the big 4 beancounters, all checking each others homework, all charging for ‘management services’. When can us taxpayers see how much has been spaffed away on them?

Billions spent to save 15 minutes London to Manchester build a commuter line from Birmingham to London?

FTFY

Channel 4 did a documentary a few years ago and not one of the industry experts they interviewed thought it would ever get north of Birmingham. The Birmingham Manchester leg will be quietly scrapped when the costs for the London to Birmingham section get north of 120 billion

I’m not sure how much has actually been spent and what is legally liable right now, but what about just binning it altogether? The maths to justify it in the first place were a joke which no commercial organisation would have passed, and from then on no one has had the balls to simply stop the spending (sunk cost fallacy). Surely an upgraded Trans Pennine route would have far superior cost-benefits.

The original design was something as follows:
Do Transpennine Route Upgrade to at least buy a bit of time while HS2 gets built to Manchester and Leeds.
Build Northern Powerhouse Rail to connect the two and expand / build upon the TRU work.
Gradually expand HS2 up to Edinburgh and Glasgow (HS3, of which vague plans and desires sort of exist).

What costs money is the constant changing of plans, timelines, deadlines and scope while also constantly delaying everything for re-scoping and redesign work.
There was a famous one of some land being acquired, then it wasn’t going to be used, then it was, then it wasn’t so the land was sold and a developer built some flats on it and then it was needed and they had to buy it back at cost of land plus cost of flats plus cost of demolishing some brand new flats. Utterly insane – and probably a fair bit of corruption as well.
Euston got redesigned half way through when, in another attempt to save money, they decided it should be 10 platforms instead of 11 (which also removes all the contingency options) and so the £105m design for Euston was binned and started again.

A lot of the initial work has already been done. Survey work, land acquisition, preparation work (including felling all the trees)… and then it gets re-phased or cancelled and you’ve done a whole load of prep work and got **** all out of it. Basically you’ve done all the destructive bits and built…nothing.

It’s sort of too-big-to-fail at the moment, it kind of needs to continue to get any sort of benefits at all because if they cancel, they’ll only look to restart work in 10 years time anyway. The whole thing is a disaster, an absolute textbook of how not to run a big project. Kind of like the Edinburgh Trams fiasco only about 100x bigger.

There’s so much connected with this though. New developments in Birmingham in particular. Plans for better regional connectivity once HS2 has taken all the express stuff off WCML. Cancel HS2 and all that gets lost as well.

Honestly should just have gone to the Chinese or Japanese and said “here you go, you’re good at this high speed rail stuff, build that”. It would have been running by now.

Honestly should just have gone to the Chinese or Japanese and said “here you go, you’re good at this high speed rail stuff, build that”. It would have been running by now.

Although absolutely true, its interesting to note that the initial Japanese project nearly died on its arse too after annihilating it’s budget

Billions spent to save 15 minutes London to Manchester?

Speed was never the point. Should have called it something else, for people who don’t look behind the titles.

DLR

I’m not sure you can really count a 35-year-old train line as modern development.

Thameslink

isn’t a new railway line. its a set of trains running on existing lines, and through a tunnel that was dug in 1874.

Cancelling HS2 now is a great idea…

Except for the minor fact that you’d very suddenly have to work out what to do with 30000 unemployed construction workers plus the entire supply industry (sorry, you cant just send them elsewhere and get them to do something else, you need a clear plan thats finianced and able to be put into action right now otherwise theyre all on the dole so thats a HUGE impact on the national economy) , what would you do with a huge ammount of half-constructed infrastructure, the issue of binning 25+ years of planning and land buy up. etc etc etc.

Oh, and the minor thing of trying to work out what to do on the core railway from London to Birmingham (very highly congested and the last upgrade carried out 20 years back was an expensive sticking plaster solution) , Crewe and Manchester that depearatley needs to be upgraded as its been operating at over max capacity for the last 15 years. Euston is long overdue a full rebuild and this still needs to happen, OOC, Birmingham Curzon street etc have been started so construction is fully underway.

Oh, and we still need to fully electrify the entire national railway system which was the original plan in the 1950’s, er sorry whoops, 60’s, 70…er 1980’s (on a shoestring..) then 2000’s er, oh, hang on, the 2010’s… instead of going half measures and chickening out of this every time to “save” money.

I mean, how do you think you will get all of that freight off the roads and onto rail? How do create additonal capacity? How do you decarbonise transport?

Face it, infrastructure is expensive. Done well it lasts a very long time (the core railway network is 180 years old) , done in half measures you need to go back and do it again and again…For some reason in the UK everyone likes to scream white elephant at the top of their voice while conveniently forgetting that we have precisely ZERO large transport infrastucture projects in living memory that have failed to deliver a clear economic and strategic benefit.
Doing infrastructure properly involves hard work and long term investment and vision that produces a tangible asset and a clear benefit so treat it as such.

In the words of Yoda: Do, or do not do. There is no try.

Or alternatively just give up and convince yourself that that is a viable long term, cost effective solution.

@kelvin There’s a ‘yes, but…’ on that. Got into an argument on Twitter with someone I know about this, as I thought the main benefit was capacity – but all the business cases were done on speed.

Big problem we have is the age of the network meaning lots of old tunnels/bridges that can’t easily be adjusted to make way for bigger trains (double deck or containers). HS2 will be built for these from the off, and so long as the lines feeding into it can take bigger trains even with 100mph running that would be helpful.

but all the business cases were done on speed

Does this mean the PR was based on speed?

The “business case” was the beginning of a modern rail network fit for the 21st Century. Currently it’s as if we’re living in the pre-motorway age, and people are pointing at plans for the first motorway and asking “what’s the point?” If we’d gone on to to build just the one motorway, they’d have had a good point.

If the cost is going up because of inflation surely they should be speeding it up and spending more sooner, so that there’s less inflation.

I’m not sure you can really count a 35-year-old train line as modern development.

In large parts of the country, that would be as close as it gets to brand spanking new!

If the cost is going up because of inflation surely they should be speeding it up and spending more sooner, so that there’s less inflation.

It’s very difficult to increase spend.
Work being done now was planned in 12-18 months ago in terms of supply chain, deliveries, staffing, ground prep, logistics etc and payment to the hundreds of contractors involved will be based on a certain amount up front and a certain amount in terms of key milestones so to spend quicker you need to hurry that along. Which you can’t really do cos it was all planned in a year ago and what you’re planning for now won’t / can’t be built for another year because it depends on all the above being available and the current work being completed.

It’s no good the tunnelling guys saying “oh yeah, we can go 3 months earlier” if the groundwork guys haven’t got to the site yet.

On the other hand, if you say “cancel it now!” then everyone still needs paying but you have no tunnel.

@5lab

Point on the London networks is they’re well maintained, have brilliant interconnections, modern high capacity trains and are on a single ticket network. There are strong bus connections too. It doesn’t matter a jot when the original tunnels were dug. None of this stuff came for free but it did come with ambition.

Yet more short sighted short termist myopic British mis-management and lack of any long term plan except how to reduce taxes for the uber rich.

Same mentality that makes us highly dependent on imported energy, have no capacity, run out of water each summer because nobody has built a decent reservoir for nearly 40 years , the roads are fecked, the motorways semi permanently jammed up, the NHS is broken, etc etc etc.

We’re heading back into the dark ages. A country that needs to stop harping back to the days of the Empire and how we won a war 70+ years ago. Those had absolutely fheckall use in 2023.

At least my offspring will have the skills and qualifications to be able to go work in numerous other countries when they want or need to. And I’ll be dead before the worst of this sh1tfest really comes home to roost.

One of the worst kept secrets ever.
Should have spent the cash up North the Yorkshire rail franchise cancells more trains than beeching

As a friend wrote elsewhere,

Quick straw poll? Who thought that #HS2 was never, ever, ever going to get past Birmingham?

*entirety of the North of England raises their hand*

Correct. Well done, everybody.

Not just the population of the north I think everyone had a suspension.

Meanwhile it sounds like there’s been a massive cut to Active Travel England’s budget, which is piss poor in a climate emergency.

NEW: Significant cuts announced for walking and cycling

£710m was approved for active travel in the 2021 Spending Review.

£230m has been spent so far. Today’s announcement of £100m for the remaining two years, means a cut of £380m. https://t.co/Wf3bO2kkWC

— APPGCW (@allpartycycling) March 9, 2023

https://amp.theguardian.com/uk-news/2023/mar/09/parts-hs2-delayed-two-years-cut-soaring-costs-rail-project

It’s very difficult to increase spend. Work being done now was planned in 12-18 months ago….etc etc

That all makes sense of course (my comment was slightly tongue in cheek), but delaying the spend doesn’t reduce the total cost of the project unless you’re actually just not doing it rather than delaying. Or you’re expecting a recession to reduce costs.

I’m with Robertajobb, we just need to do it*. We’ve had 10-50 years (depending on your point of view/which bit of the country you’re in) of running things down, ‘sweating the assets’, selling off the family silver and ripping the wiring out of the walls to weigh in the copper. And now we’re looking around at the mess left, wondering why a country without a functioning public transport system isn’t particularly productive and why real wages haven’t increased from where they were before the 2008 crash, but still finding excuses not to do anything about it.

* By ‘it’ I mean HS2 and a million other infrastructure projects. Wind power, solar power, cycle lanes, local railways, town and city regeneration, trams, hospitals, schools, parks, etc.

Another failure of the conservatives. Have they actually delivered anything,but failures?

JeZ

Have they actually delivered anything

Shareholder value innit. We’re all have extensive stock portfolios don’t we? 🤑

The whole of the north of England is presently looking at their utterly dysfunctional, Victorian railway network, looking at all the investment that was promised, then cancelled (again!) and taking this as confirmation that HS2 is just yet more squillions spent on servicing commuter lines into London

The rest of the country can just rot for all they care.

They literally couldn’t give a ****.

Let’s all rejoice that after spending the GDP of Spain you will one day be able to get from Birmingham to London in half the time it takes you to get from Manchester to Leeds

‘Levelling up’?

I said from the start that they should have started at the most Northerly point and built South, that’s the only way to make sure the whole thing gets built.

The whole of the north of England is…taking this as confirmation that HS2 is just yet more squillions spent on servicing commuter lines into London

I think you’re mistaking your own opinion for that of the whole of the north, and you’re mistaking your own rusted-on prejudices about HS2 for about what HS2 factually was (which has been explained to you by numerous people numerous times on this thread).

Shareholder value innit. We’re all have extensive stock portfolios don’t we? 🤑

If this were about satisfying the private sector, then it wouldn’t have been paused. Those contractors and engineers would have preferred work to continue!

The problem is… what HS2 “factually was” and what we’re now getting in “the north” do not resemble each other. Lack of surprise about this further retraction of scope comes from the fact that many people up here expected that to happen, they have never bought into it being a nationwide project… and it turns out they were right.

[ I’m a long term defender of HS2… but impossible for me to argue that this isn’t now yet just another “London First” project ]

I think you’re mistaking your own opinion for that of the whole of the north

You reckon?

If you conducted a poll to see where people up here wanted infrastructure investment to go

A) improve and upgrade the crumbling rail network in the north

B) HS2

I can assure you you’ll only get one answer. And it’s painfully clear we can have one, but not both

You’d get a similar unanimous answer to the question ‘do you believe HS2 will ever get north of Birmingham?’

Maybe it’s you who needs to look at your prejudices?

We’re all funding a ludicrously expensive white elephant that will, once again, exclusively benefit London. All while the public transport infrastructure in the north continues to collapse through being starved of even the most minuscule levels of investment