HS2 spiralling costs

You only have to look at how shoddily the current government have treated Eurostar to see how little they think of rail travel.

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!

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 swanky 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 **** up everything they touch. For example:

How National Highways bridge infilling saga played out

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.

Looks like no HS2 to Manchester

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-66813734

This lot really do foul everything they touch, don’t they?

matt_outandaboutFull Member
Looks like no HS2 to Manchester

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-66813734

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…

Looks like no HS2 to Manchester

Maybe, maybe not – I think there’s been too much prep work to properly bin it off but they’re certainly trying all sorts of total bollocks to “cut costs” – costs which would have been a shitload lower if they’d just have got on with it in the first place.

Well said. It’s not HS2 that’s the problem. It’s the decision-making, planning laws and blatant corruption of construction/railway contracts at fault. Maybe we should’ve just set our sights on HS2 to Milton Keynes by 2050!

In other shocking and totally unexpected news… apparently the pope is a catholic?!

Greater Manchester Mayor Andy Burnham said: “Why should it be the North of England that pays the price?

“What we are going to end up with here is in the southern half of the country, a modern, high-speed rail network, and the northern half of the country left with crumbling Victorian infrastructure. That won’t level us up, it will do the exact opposite.”

No shit. Who on earth could possibly have seen that one coming down the (half-completed, massively over-budget, years behind schedule) line? 🙄

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!

COVID, then Brexit. Still, the Brexiteer electorate of Kent will be happy to hear they’re taking back control. Closed stations, outbound lorry tailbacks, incoming small boats…

https://www.independent.co.uk/travel/news-and-advice/eurostar-kent-ashford-ebbsfleet-brexit-b2150948.html

This is much bigger than HS2, lots of people from all sides of the political world understand we have some economic challenges coming over the next 50 years that on the face of it we may not be able to deal with via the usual sell assets, tax poor people, borrow shit loads approach.

We have been subject to two worked examples Covid and Brexit both of which demonstrates our lack of real resilence ad a country, we simply dont have the internal resources to cope (resources include money, people, industry  food raw materials etc)

Patrick Minford yes that sackess **** actually understands this but his soloution is thought by many on the right to be all thats left and this means that the vast majority of this country become poor (really poor) some people have thought that Brexit was actually designed to remove the abilty of most people to leave the country and in practical terms consolidated cheap labour.

HS2 and obvious lack of other infrastructure projects is actually down to the fact that many on the right think they will not be needed other than to move cheap labour to where its needed ( see the Wansbeck line in Northumberland)

We all need to remember the basic fact that infrastructure benefits ordinary people from jobs to access etc. Infrastructure does not benefit rich people they use helicopters and Range Rovers and even the money they make from the contracts to build is very short term.

If we remove the “City” from our current economy then i think we drop out of the top 20 from 6th.

If you look at the lack of investment in renewable energy, farming, manufacturing, technology, education over the last 10 years (outside London not including cross rail) is virtually non existent. The running down of the NHS is simply because many politicians don’t believe we can pay for this in the future ( note Starmers comments) the attack on the triple lock on what is one of the worst pensions in Europe again is about reducing future cost.

Importing cheap labour is now in law, keeping wage growth down (Public sector, Doctors, Teachers etc) again is critical to reduce future costs. The lack of investment in education and the political drive to reduce University access again undrpins this thought that we will simply not need that kevel of well educated ypung peolle.

Most of this is short term sticking plasters while those people that can realign their positions will survive the coming years.

Our balance of payments is already unsustainable, let alone our debt repayments. The blunt reluctance to tax people and business appropriately by both sides of the political divide means we will never address this problem

Like climate change we are at the point where no one wants to make the step change to address it, and those with real money dont need to worry about it.

For me its all in plain site and I think for Politicians like Starmer its well recognised.

Edited because I’m repeating myself.

Infrastructure does not benefit rich people they use helicopters and Range Rovers

🤣

Infrastructure does not benefit rich people they use helicopters and Range Rovers

Eh? Have you had a look at what a return train ticket from Manchester to London costs nowadays?

Who on earth do you think HS2 is being built for? Ticket prices will be far beyond the reach of most people. They’ll be paid for on corporate expense accounts.

Looks like no HS2 to Manchester

I think it’s pretty safe to say if there ever was going to be an HS2 in the north, they’d have started in the north, where it’s actually needed.

Rather than Ealing.

Who on earth do you think HS2 is being built for? Ticket prices will be far beyond the reach of most people. They’ll be paid for on corporate expense accounts.

That’s as maybe but it then frees up the WCML for use by all the poor people and means you can run more stopping services, more freight and more local commuter services because you’ve effectively moved all the express traffic onto HS2. How they’re paying for it is neither here nor there, it gives more rail capacity elsewhere for the normal everyday folk who are traveling a few stops, not doing regular back and forth from the Cheshire pile to the London office.

If the road through your small town is chock-a-block with commuters and the locals can’t move around effectively due to the gridlock, no-one bats an eyelid when you suggest building a bypass to shift all the commuters onto that and free the town up for the locals and the shoppers, in fact it would be actively campaigned for. This is the rail equivalent.