There is apparently no news this morning unless you want to talk about HS2. But even then, there is no news. There is just some speculation, confusion and almost certain misinformation.
I am not bothering to speculate on what might really happen. What I do know is that HS2 was always a white elephant. The emphasis of rail investment should always have been on improving the system as a whole in the north, and on improving freight flows. The imperative was not saving a few minutes on journey times to London.
The whole system of working out what was significant dismally failed when it came to HS2, which the Tories always seem to have treated as a trophy project. As such if it fails it will say everything that we need to know about them, but not much more.
There are, however, lessons to learn. One is that if investment on such a massive scale takes place, it has to benefit everyone. The national grid requires such investment now.
Another is that to be economically efficient investment has to be capable of delivery at varying speeds to match the state of the economy. Delivery of green infrastructure does that, as I have been pointing out for about twenty years. If the economy booms it can be scaled back, and vice versa. As a macroeconomic stability programme, it is perfect in a way HS2 never could be. Once HS2 started, it had to finish and could deliver nothing until it was. A green investment programme could deliver in stages and so deliver a much faster return, whilst still being capable of delivery at varying speeds.
The lesson is quite simple in that case. We need investment. What we do not need are flashy projects. We instead need to create the infrastructure for a new way of living. It might not look as exciting to an egotistical minister, but it delivers a lot more for society. One day we might have ministers who appreciate that.
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Guardian Columnist and former British Railways Board member Simon Jenkins made the point some years ago that in terms of passenger journeys buses have a far larger share of journeys than rail.
Not only that but bus users are less likley to have a choice as they dont have a car and are more likley to be poot, old or otherwise disadvantaged.
So why no investment in buses and trams?
Perhaps because the users dont have a voice that Government wants to hear
This is also an interesting take on the whole subject
https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/2007/04/high-speed-trains-planes-on-wheels/
So the tory conference is in Manchester, and Sunak is going there to tell them he may scrap the HS2 link. I think there are rail strikes both ends of the conference.
On the other hand there is good news for Manchester buses.
https://weownit.org.uk/act-now/end-the-ban-on-public-ownership-of-buses-now
Nothing whatsoever to do with the tories, though, and I’m sure Andy Burnham and Cat will tell them so on the fringe of the conference. It took a lot of work between the council and weownit.
https://www.manchestereveningnews.co.uk/news/greater-manchester-news/the-new-bee-network-bus-27771447
Now all we need is lots of other councils to follow suit, like North Yorkshire, West Yorkshire and South Yorkshire are doing.
North East will do so once Jamie Driscoll is re-elected as mayor.
HS2 is already becoming a project of mythical stupidity and destruction.
One contractor I spoke to reckons that he’s built more roads over it than there will be rail miles.
Eco-contractors tell me that a lot of precious habitat has been destroyed for no good reason.
But what really makes me angry is how the redundancy – the spare capacity in the rails themselves was ruthlessly cut back on the existing network before privatisation and during. I’ve seen so much de-quadrification of track – effectively reducing line capacity over the years and crowding train pathways on less track – in the name of short term cost cutting.
And then they have the temerity to use lack of capacity as a justification for HS2?
The other thing that is plainly stupid about this new mainline is that they have still not increased the feeder lines into mainlines from the shires etc – there has been no real rolling back of the Beeching cuts as lines have been continued to be closed down so you’ll have a new mainline essentially fighting other mainlines for the passengers who are being squeezed out of existing infrastructure.
We need to be increasing access to the mainline as much as possible and un-mothballing or reinstating routes where possible.
A lot of this money could have been spent on taking the dog legs out of existing high speed lines and we should also have a long term plan to rebuild the UK network to the european load gauge which would result in more comfort and capacity on the trains themselves.
What a waste.
Changing the name could help: Medium Speed 2.
Any engineer will tell you that the costs of achieving any particular speed tend to rise asymptotically as the speeds increase. Sensible people know that the 20mph speed limit has not increased journey times significantly and as a van driver in London I can personally state that this is the case and also that the driving is more relaxed.
Bring back InterCity 125- quite fast enough for a country of this size.
Agreed
I always smile at those racing by me on major roads.
I do not try to beat speed limits. I get there almost as quickly with much less stress.
You make a good point.
The standard international speed for high speed rail is 300kph, 189mph. It demands excellent track maintenance for understandable safety and efficiency reasons.
I believe we were told HS2 would have a line speed of about 220mph.
That has never been adopted for regular running because to maintain track to that level would be very, very expensive indeed.
Infrastructure is too important to be left in the hands of imaginations of idiots.
Intercity rail is not comparable to stop start urban traffic though. Not least because it’s not mixing with pedestrians etc.
Intercity trains will spend a lot of time traveling at the higher speed, unlike cars racing between red lights. Stops are far apart so they can travel long distances quickly.
Intercity rail needs to compete with air travel. If we can’t even build HS2 I can’t see us ever getting high speed lines up to Glasgow/Edinburgh to stop flights.
HS2 is valuable because it tells you almost everything you need to know about Britain. It was not designed to modernise Britain. It was not designed to help the North. It was a neoliberal plan to use public money to invest in London. The real plan for HS2 was to build infrastructure for London, and give London growth potential by turning Birmingham into a dormitory town for London. In that sense it is already out of date in the digital age, but it sucks the life out of the North, and protects London from having to rely on its own resources; instead of using everybody’s resources exclusively for itself.
From the start these London first priorities (with the Nimbyism of the South East shires and the need for extensive tunnelling) meant the original cost estimate meant around 50% of the total cost of HS2 for the whole country was just to produce a line to Birmingham (and Scotland was simply excluded from the plan). Then the costs of exiting London escalated; so they started cutting virtually all of it, north of Birmingham. Landon first, and last. Then they began to doubt they could even bring the line into Euston without increasing the cost by eye-watering proportions. I should add that the original plan was to bring passengers into London. If someone from ‘the North’ was not visiting London, but was bound for Europe. Here was the HS2 plan. Even if HS2 reached Euston, then the Europe bound passenger would have to change not just trains, but stations in London; and walk to St.Pancras (would a taxi deign to take a fare for a few hundred yards?). The plan effectively assumes London is the final destination.
It would be far, far cheaper and economically more effective to upgrade lines throughout Britain, linking them to a line that by-passed London altogether (costs drop like a stone), and link direct to the Channel tunnel. Access to Europe direct from Manchester, Leeds, Glasgow Newcastle and Edinburgh would be far more economically valuable and an enhancement to life in Britain.
London has already devoured the whole of Britain, and reduced it to waste. It has to stop.
Agreed
Looking back, John Warren is entirely correct in what he says below
“HS2 is valuable because it tells you almost everything you need to know about Britain. It was not designed to modernise Britain. It was not designed to help the North. It was a neoliberal plan to use public money to invest in London. The real plan for HS2 was to build infrastructure for London, and give London growth potential by turning Birmingham into a dormitory town for London”
The Treasury sees HS2 as essentially another commuter line into London, further driving economic activity towards London and the south east, their preferred area for all transport spending
That is my view
It seems Sunak, probably having taken fright at the media and public reaction to the HS2 leak, is now saying he is considering ‘how costs can be controlled’. This is easy. The best way to control the costs is for Sunak and his government to resign immediately.
That fixes the biggest problem; the Conservative’s proven failure to have the common sense not to sign bad contracts they should never have signed; or to provide a framework for competent project management, are totally inescapable; guilty as charged. Conservatives are financial bunglers, on an industrial scale. All the HS2 problems go back to the original framing of the project, and then the execution of an ill-thought through project. This is classic Conservatism; disaster built out of grandiose populist ideas, and no idea how to manage them. Here is a starting point to grasp the cluelessness; it appears the cost of HS2 London-Birmingham is already the cost of the whole HS2 project, covering the north of England. HS2 has been one long, long slow-motion train crash. They have been piling up the waste and profligacy for years; and done nothing. It is now a financial disaster both to finish it; or terminate it.
Here is an example; they are apparently burying/mothballing two very expensive tunnelling machines; because they now doubt HS2 will ever reach Euston, even if it is built. Think of that. A £60Bn project (and more) to take Birmingham to London – that doesn’t actually even go to London.
Conservatives, eh?
Professor Stephen Glaister, an expert on transport economics at Imperial College has provided a withering assessment of the HS2 project on BBC R5 Live. The critical point I wish to focus on here (one among many I have not time to develop), is his observation that the Government was warned when it initially signed the contracts, that the allocation of risks among signatories had not satisfactorily been addressed (and was advised to re-negotiate them); Glaister refers to “birds coming home to roost”. That is catastrophic.
Glaister confirms that HS2 specifically excluded the West Country, Wales and Scotland. So much for our “precious Union”; but hey, the Conservatives can rely on the dim-witted Scottish Unionists to support a Union that is, in real time slowly dismantling the life and substance of Scotland with increasing casual ease; and reducing it to a gumptionless shell (illustrated by the toe-curling spineless fake-leadership of all the Scottish Unionist Parties). So much, incidentally for devolution: it is now being used as a Trojan Horse to undermine the significant areas of independence Scotland had maintained since the Treaty of Union; Parliament and quasi-‘British law’ is increasingly being introduced to subvert what freedom Scotland has always possessed to act in its own way, in its own interests.
I should add here that the proposition that the Conservatives are “financially competent” is false; demonstrably so on HS2, on Covid, and the economy as a whole. The Conservatives are endemic financial bunglers. The nonsense that Conservatives are competent is false now; and has always been false through the ages. HS2 is a good illustrative example of the abject stupidity of conservative government; and there is no hiding place from responsibility for the disaster; a disaster that unfolds – whatever they now do: that is neoliberal Conservatism in a nutshell.
Thanks John, your second para neatly summarises from a Scottish perspective the steady encroachment of centralised UK governance on the devolved nations. HS2 is just another weapon in this process. It’s my understanding that HS2, like Crossrail, was classified as a “UK Priority project”, which means its financing comes from general taxation across the whole of the UK. Does Glaister mention this? Whether he does or not is largely immaterial, but (if my understanding is correct) it illustrates the in-built bias and casual disdain of successive UK governments. HS2 was never intended to reach Scotland or Wales, but their taxpayers were expected to contribute via taxes nevertheless.
Mr Mathieson,
It is quite clear that the Government is using its Reserved Powers to attempt to undermine not just devolution, but use these powers aggressively (and simultaneously to try to use the Supreme Court) to unravel longstanding areas of independence maintained within Scotland, and rarely challenged. All this is new in British politics, and our frankly limited, supine politicians (notably the Unionists) do not even understand what is happening. On HS2, given its scale and its significance in ‘levelling up’ (whatever that meant; almost certainly all spin and no substance) and as a key infrastructure driver of economic activity (‘key infrastructure’ – Sunak’s term today. Nothing for Scotland even if it is built) ; Scotland was simply to be excluded. The problem that is less certain is the sleight of hand around the Barnet formula consequentials. I think there was a Treasury FOI that suggested the Department for Transport’s 2022-25 spend was £22.6bn for HS2, and the 2022 Barnett Consequentials were £276m. This neatly does not allow a population based comparison; it is only for one year and we do not know the phasing of expenditure (it will now be well above £22.6Bn is surmise). On £22.6Bn and a population base, the Barnett consequential I surmise 2022-25 (four years) would be around £2Bn for Scotland. £276m is only 14% of £2Bn, for who knows how many years. This how Scotland is governed from Westminster. Nothing is clear. Nothing makes sense. Transparency is NIL.
John, your last paragraph concerning the utter incompetence of the Tories when it comes to business or managing anything cannot be said often enough.
They can manage the simple stuff like rentier capitalism, speculation in a rigged market and asset stripping value created by others, but running anything like a competitive business enterprise is utterly beyond them.
I think it is the real reason they always fall back on mumbo jumbo about markets, another concept they do not understand.
HS2’s shoogly peg connection to Euston seems to have fallen off the wall. Here is Sunak’s evasive, shifty answer to a straight-talking reporter in the North: “Old Oak Common is on the new Elizabeth Line and actually the connections from Old Oak Common to most London destinations, whether that is Heathrow, the City, the West End, Canary Wharf, are actually very strong”.
That is really handy if you are arriving from Glasgow or Manchester, and going – not to London – but to Paris. End of the line at Old Oak Common, and take a tube to find your way to St.Pancras….. and then you can catch a train that actually takes you where you are going: and it will probably be just the same 50 years from now (but by then London will no doubt have swallowed £1Trn building Crossrail 3, 4 and 5; but it will still, almost certainly take 4 hours, fastest train time from Edinburgh to Birmingham).
So, £60Bn+ blown on a high speed rail line, and as Theresa May might say, “nothing has changed” – from the time spent on British rail journeys fifty years ago; and back then, at least your inter-city actually took you to the centre of your destination city. Perhaps HS2 should be renamed RyanRail (the station is not necessarily, actually all that close to the city centre you are visiting).
Thank you and well said, Richard and PSR.
I live in Buckinghamshire, come across the disaster almost daily and see evidence of what Richard and PSR state.
Why the old Central railway, linking up with the original proposal for Crossrail / Elizabeth line, could not have been resurrected is beyond us yokels. Also, why we can’t have a leg of the east west railway.
It’s not just the contractors doing well, some of the aristocrat landowners have done well, too.
I work regularly overseas and come across how such projects are managed / overseen and costs controlled.
Early this year, the British High Commission to Mauritius had representatives from the UK Infrastructure Projects Authority over, a pilot for how the IPA can sell its know how. When it turned out, HMG had little money to fund projects overseas, few British suppliers exist for such projects and the IPA has little technical ability, the delegation was laughed off the island. One wonders if the delegation noticed the airport, gifted by uncle Xi, and resurrection of the colonial era railways, gifted by uncle Modi. Both were built it on schedule and budget.
The old Great Central line was built to continental lading gauge. Its closure in 1966 was a scandal, one of several lines like some in Wales and the Cambridge – Oxford line that should never have gone. The Woodhead route was another.
Wholeheartedly agreed – the gradients and camber of the Great Central railway was thoroughly modern enabling higher speeds and Britain destroyed its newest railway first!
The Woodhead route could have gone all the way Marylebone as an electric railway but instead of having a mix of AC and DC power like Europe, Britain simply let DC moulder and went for a half-heartedly and sporadic AC electrification of the West Coast mainline instead.
All the GC stations could have been joined up to tram and trolleybus routes as well.
But the car, road and London lobby won instead. That’s why we all runny noses and cough a lot.
Agreed
Completely agree with you, Richard. Why the Tories and Labour ever backed this project is totally baffling. I agree for the Tories it was a trophy project, but, for Labour, a Party that is SUPPOSED to champion the North, why they got into a project that ONLY benefits London, is crazy. Even the first phase only gives minor benefits to the Midlands (15 mins off the existing time from Birmingham – and that’s lost with a terminal at Old Oak Common!). Its just about extending the London commuting zone northwards.
For Labour, a complete rail infrastructure improvement across the Midlands and the North, was always the most logical solution. Yet even today, they won’t admit their mistake in not advocating it.
HS2 – the whitest of white elephants!
I vividly remember thinking when they originally announced HS2, they’re building this the wrong way round.
It should have started by connecting the main Northern Conurbations from Newcastle through York, Leeds, Manchester and Liverpool, then continue down through Birmingham and eventually London and the Channel Tunnel.
But I also thought, “But it’s really about London isn’t it”, and it was.
Can you imaging the ongoing benefits as each section was completed.
It’s like the 1970’s when they where building the M62. As each section was completed, it had dramatic improvements to East West travel. However the big question being asked at the time from the London Centric media was, “But what’s it for? It goes nowhere “.
It linked the East Coast and Europe to the docks at Liverpool. Big I provement in freight transport and it became the busiest motorway for freight I the uk.
It was never meant to come up to York or Newcastle, though. Living near Durham, I wondered why anyone would catch a high-speed train to Birmingham and Leeds, then Newcastle, just to reduce journey times by a few minutes.
The real point of HS2 was not a particular speed, or a particular journey time. It was that by building a whole new line, you could divert long-distance passenger traffic onto it. That would then free up the timetable on the conventional lines for expansion of freight and commuting. It is something that Christian Wolmar has been arguing for years. It has been the driver for a lot of the high speed lines in France, Germany and Italy. Unfortunately the whole discussion has been trivialised to x minutes less to Birmingham or whatever.
That is not to say that electrification of the rest of the network shouldn’t be a very high priority, but HS2 has become a white elephant because of opponents and the press blotting out the much bigger strategic picture.
So yes, let’s put more lorries and cars on the motorways.
But that implied using the Great Central
For those who are not Puff Puff Buffs…………
Loading Gauge. Railways have two Gauges, the first one is the distance between the inside faces of the rails, its the same in Europe, except Ireland, Spain, Portugal & the former USSR. Thats why Eurostar & before that Train Ferry’s allow trains to run through from the UK to Europe, BUT
Loading Gauge. This is basically how high and wide you can make your train. Because we were the first people to build railways UK Trains have to be smaller than European ones so things like freight wagons that run into the UK from Europe are smaller than most European equipment
Great Central Railway AKA the London Extension of the MS&LR (AKA Money Sunk and Lost) grandiose scheme to extend a provincial railway to London (Marylebone) at the end of the 19th Century via Leicester, Nottingham etc Never made any money and probably was the reason why the LNER that it was merged into in 1923 was forever broke. Closed in about 1966.
Note for Puff Puff Buffs
The Great Central was not built to UIC (European) Loading Gauge as UIC didn’t exist when it was built and while its loading gauge isnt bad by UK standards its nowhere near ‘European’ dimensions. Its an urban myth.
For All of You
I have an article from many years ago that points out that distances between major European Cities are quite large, they aint in the UK so the benefits of travelling at high speed are much more limited especially if you end up stopping at every gate post between London and Birmingham.
Mr Boxall
A word in your shell please if I may…………….
I’ve looked at the source of your input above and whilst I agree that the UIC existed before the GC, the same source does say that the GCL line was ‘engineered to very high standards’ in an era when train speeds had already increased.
When Eurostar first ran from Waterloo, you may remember that changes had to be made to the rather slow urban route it had to navigate to get just to the south coast. The Great Central Line would have been much easier to convert to take bigger trains, and its sections were straighter and its station layouts more simple. Great Central line speeds were higher – the ‘Windcutter’ trains – fast freights – got their nickname from this fact.
I also maintain that a properly integrated public transport system could have made the best use of the Great Central and that (perhaps) some of the restrictive and older Midland and LNER lines could have gone (or have been relegated to freight) with the complicated layouts and more severe gradients – the Midland Mainline south of Nottingham is no race track.
‘Puff puff trains’ or not (and I’m a BR diesel fan myself) you fail to note what really happened with Britain’s railways – Ernest Marple – a road builder no less – got the transport minister job and then took on Beeching and his axe and built the M1. This was controversial then and is still actually controversial today. Proof if ever it was needed that the Tory penchant for helping themselves has been around for a long time.
The thing is this: everyone thinks that the railways (like the trams, like the trolley buses) had just had their day and fell away ‘naturally’. Even places like California in the U.S had their public transport system bought out by road builders and then closed down in order to build more ‘freeways’.
Wrong.
The railways did not just stop being effective. It was the growth in the private car and road haulage and the vested interests supporting that and stupid laws that made trains take loads and freight upon which it lost money – something that even coastal shipping was not made to do. And it was WW2 that broke many private companies as the country’s railways supported the war effort.
We were lied to and sold a dream (‘the great car economy’) and they are still selling us that dream as if it were sustainable – the car, unlimited freedom and boy are we paying for it now in an increasingly toxic environment where the clean air act is essentially ignored.
Thanks
Talking about the absence of news… the AI Summit and agenda thereof is way, waaay more important than HSI. Genuinely difficult issue which atm confined to ‘Foreign Policy’, but AI governance has overwhelming implications for domestic policy down the line. This is crying out for public education and awareness.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/sep/25/ai-bioweapons-rishi-sunak-safety
In reference to no news; is there, or is there not a fairly fundamental Big Tech anti-trust case currently in Court in the US, that is not being widely reported, or is in ‘closed’ session?
The problem with neoliberalism is it only goes one way (long presciently forecast by Adam Smith): its end-game is never competition, but monopoly; which is why anti-trust cases are important. Note wel, they may happen in the US: but anti-trust cases rarely ever come to court in the UK, because only very small businesses are faced with the actual business of competition; which is why so many fail. Big business rarely fails in Britain, and is often bailed out if it does fail, on the grounds it is TBTF (or to save an industry considered essential); especially in finance and banking.
You are so right about the end game.
There is nothing about markets in neoliberalism, at all
This 2019 Independent article explains the benefits more clearly. It’s not about speed, it’s about capacity. Two sets of tracks means we can run high-speed long distance trains, and many more local trains.
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/hs2-logistics-financial-benefit-controversy-a8937936.html
When I was a kid there were 3 commuter trains per hour into Manchester from our small stop. Now there is just 1 because the West Coast Main Line takes all the capacity. If we don’t build HS2 now, in a few years we’ll be lamenting our short-sighted failure to invest in infrastructure.
That problem could have been solved by sorting out Oxford Road.
Very expensive
Not nearly as expensive as HS2
Oxford Road doesn’t help. The slow commuter trains along the Macclesfield-Manchester Piccadilly route use the same tracks as the fast trains from London to Manchester Piccadilly. To run a decent commuter service, we need to lay down new lines and new signals so we can run both. The extra speed of HS2 is just a by-product. If you’re building new tracks and signals you might as well build modern ones that can run faster trains.
Look at the colossal benefits the Tube has had for London. Why shouldn’t Manchester get a bit of commuter rail infrastructure too.
Oxford Raod will still be there.
I think you are wrong, having stood on uts platforms a great many times.
Richard, I agree with what you say on most subjects but I have to disagree on this one.
And I’m surprised you’ve fallen for HS2 was never about “saving a few minutes on journey times to London”. HS2 was always about creating much-needed capacity to relieve pressure on the west coast and east coast main lines, both of which are very busy and are mixed use railways carrying both passengers and freight – with the latter often getting in the way
HS2 would take most of the inter city traffic off the WC and EC lines and create more capacity on them for local services and freight – both of which are constrained at the moment
Maybe
But the ECML never went to Birmingham
The eastern leg would have shifted the Leeds – London, and Newcastle/Edinburgh – London traffic on to HS2 and off the classic ECML
I recently travelled on high-speed train Germany and it was an excellent experience. We always seem to be behind others in this country. The HS2 farce makes me despair
German trains are a long way from what they were, all reports tell me
HS2 was never going to go to Newcastle/ Edinburgh, so why would it take passengers off the ECML?
If I lived in Leeds I’d still rather go direct rather than via Manchester and Birmingham.
That would be my opinion too
The plan was for HS2 to link up with the ECML north of Leeds, speeding up Newcastle/Edinburgh – London times considerably.
I know that, but why. My idea of a train journey always has been to look out of the window at the landscape, not see it go by in a blur.
If you live in the North East, as I do, you do not want to get to London via Leeds, Manchester and Birmingham.
Whatever happened to Pendolinos, by the way?
Regarding HS2, dare I suggest that other lines all over the country get electrified to carry more passengers, and leave HS2 to freight?
This has been interesting reading for someone who isn’t a train buff (or “puff puff buff” as delightfully described above).
In this case it is ultimately a problem of how democracy works in practice. It has been obvious for years – and more so recently – that weaning people off using private cars needs better public transport, and making up for the longstanding deficit in railway investment is a big part of that. Our democratic system meant the first big investment had to be made in something eyecatching, HS2, even if that wasn’t the most cost effective way of benefitting the country. If you want to oppose that it is a dozen years too late, it was a decision made under Cameron although I think the idea of creating domestic high speed lines linking to the existing Channel Tunnel line came from the Brown government.
My view is that even if I would have preferred a different initial project, the principle of investing in public transport is sound and the project chosen should be finished and further investment should then be committed elsewhere. Complaints about the original decision would be better directed to ensuring better prioritisation of investment in future. (For what it is worth, my view is that ahead of HS2 there should have been investment in new construction overcoming current pinch points in the principal main line routes, electrification of those lines that have previously missed out, and creating good transpennine links. But they didn’t ask me).
I agree with your priorities.
The Midland main line is not electrified, for example. Nor the line to the south west. And not rand pennies route. Nor major lines in Scotland. Net zero is not happening as a result.
Might be worth a read
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Estate-Were-Whos-Driving-Culture/dp/0575401567
HS2 will not be a white elephant assuming it is built as originally planned. One of the biggest constraints for rail freight is capacity on the west coast main line, HS2 will remove all the long distance passenger traffic to allow more freight but it must be completed as originally planned including the eastern branch and to Euston. Please note that at least half of the HS2 trains will extend on to existing tracks and speed up travel to North Wales, Liverpool, Scotland and the midlands. The reason for the increased cost for Euston is because the government wants a skyscraper on top and due to the ground conditions, the foundations will be very expensive.
As a mining engineer for over 40 years and been involved in small easy to clean fail safe pumps to large whole mine construction, operation and closed down to full environmental standards. The tailings dam is now a nature reserve. I have been disgusted by the total failure of infrastructure construction in the UK
Having a completely separate company to build small or large projects would never be used in the mining industry. Even when building a new mine on a green field site, the staff for operating the mine on completion, would have project engineers overseeing construction and safety.
You can not make a reasonable cost estimate with out having a fully detailed design. In the mining industry we specify in-house the requirements, review the options and may use consultants to provide a design. This detailed plan, carefully scrutinised for errors, ease of operation and maintenance is then used to generate a project cost. Often operational and maintenance labour, materials and consumables are estimated for predicting operational costs. When I heard of the management was leaving before the project was complete this was a red flag to me that major problems had been encountered and TFL knew nothing.
Project management cannot be left to the contractor or contracted out. All large projects have many levels of management so reporting to the owner cannot be relied upon and CrossRail highlights this. Having your own clerk of works and project managers are essential and means you have direct on-site, up-to-date information, control of the project design, progress, cost and your project engineers can quickly fix problems. Note that towards the end of a project you may need additional staff for updating the schedule, fixing problems and rescheduling.
There is an official procedure called “Construction Quality Assurance” which specifies testing and recording all construction materials and operations. I would recommended that this should be extended to include detailed reasons and changes to the design to provide a comprehensive project report.
Some critical factors that will increase costs and delay completion.
1. Do not use a design and build contract. This is handing your check book to the contractors, poor construction, incentives the contractors to take longer, skimp on standards and quality.
2. Do not forget inflation if you take over 5 years before starting the contract, the project cost could go up by 20% at 3% inflation.
3. During the above 5 years you have to pay your staff and the contractors will also have to get more money..
4. If you double the time of the project you will have to take into account inflation and double all the overhead costs (management).
5. If you do not have an agreed design the you will have over expenditure
6, Project schedule and project management requires an agreed design which must be split up into discrete sections. Regular inspections by your own project engineers will allow measurement against the schedule to control progress. All good project management programs allow comparison of actual progress against the plan this will help remedial action. All projects will require some rescheduling, this is not a failure but good practice.
7. Regular progress meetings are required, I recommend monthly. TFL, CrossRail, you failed to over see the project and you paid for it. You should have been in charge of the project management, then you would have known about the project slippage and enforced action to pull it back on schedule. Towards the end of projects I have even used weekly meetings so that actions can be discussed and agreed as quickly as possible.
8. Towards the end of the project is the most critical in planning as slippage and interference between work streams become critical. When I heard of the CrossRail management leaving just at the most difficult time I knew that there were major problems.
Finally the original London to Birmingham Railway and the Grand Junction Railway (Birmingham to Liverpool/Manchester railways were done in parallel and took 3 years to get through Parliament and significantly less the 5 years to complete. All constructed by hand.
PS.
You cannot de-carbonise HGV’s and even the Tories have given up the idea of using trolley electric HGV’s, so all HGV traffic have to go by rail. One big advantage of this is that road damage depends upon the vehicle weight to the 4th power. So all most all road works will not be required.
A point not touched on in all this debate is why HS2 is costing so much more to build than similar lines in other countries. And it’s not just HS2. Incompetence and profiteering by the construction industry? Who happen to be big Tory donors. Or repeated delays and changes in direction by government?
Either way, unless that problem is fixed we will continue to have shabby, late, expensive infrastructure.
Helpfully:
https://www.samdumitriu.com/p/britains-infrastructure-is-too-expensive
It’s not just HS2
Useful, with interesting comparisons. According to this source, French tramway projects cost £29m-£60m per mile; UK tramway projects cost £66m-£252m per mile. This disparity is repeated for underground/subway contracts. A depressing commentary on British fecklessness. Markets, eh?
Having been a project manager and reviewed many projects, continually changing goals with suppliers effectively on cost plus deals is a recipe guaranteed to deliver cost and time over-runs. Defence has just the same problems.
A friend calls HS2 the “Ryanair Railway”, as it never quite gets you to your intended destination.
A friend of mine calls HS2 the “Ryan Air Railway” because it never quite gets you to your intended destination.
Having a French branch to the family I’ve watched over decades how TGV has had a positive impact. Eliminating many internal flights. And no, all business has not moved to Paris – France is much more spread out. Less traffic on the (better maintained) roads. Far more electrified. Yes they have the problem of people leaving rural areas but Covid has had some of the same reversing effects as here.
But then France has always been both dirigiste and communitaire. Technocratic but much more decentralised to Departments, towns and even villages.
Could we benefit from an efficient, electrified, higher speed network, linking all parts of the UK? I suspect yes. Sadly we are ending up having to squabble over who gets what from a supposedly very small and reducing pie. Whilst making a complete mess of too many important projects.
Agreed
A good idea (maybe) gone to waste because like the Elizabeth Line it became absurdly complex, I suspect
Complex = How do we make sure London has 99.9% of the cake, and private contractors make a profit no matter what?
On a tenuously related issue, I am curious why the A9 ‘dualling’ (a political football currently in Scotland); could only produce one tender for the contract; which led to more delays. One single tender! It seems nobody wants the job. Here is the perspective. The SNP have rightly been criticised for managing a ferry building contract badly; total cost now probably circa £300m, against original estimate of <£100m. Bad news, but in British terms, 'small beer' (its around 0.005% of the HS2 cost for London-Birmingham alone; probably without Euston!).
The political fall-out has probably made the SNP very careful about drafting contracts (The Conservatives have given up on policy; they have milked the blunder ten times over). On the A9, it seems nobody wants the contracts. Could it be the private contractors have read the contracts and received a shock; unlike routine public contracts in Britain, no easy cost+ escape clauses that dumps all the risks and over-runs conveniently back on the State, no matter what (that are inevitable because they have never had to think about it much before, or take risks)?
Of course, I do not know; but look at everything around us (trams in Edinburgh; HS2; Carillon – it had 400 public sector contracts, with poor guidelines; all the PPE financing disasters, the cladding fiasco, and on and on; I am sure other can easily add to the long, long list).
And once again the tories have pushed the dualling of the A1 into the long grass. That would get them a lot of votes in the North East, possibly saving them at least two MPs.
My daughters in law are Spanish and Danish. Responses they get from their respective familes are what are you doing to the country and why don’t you came back here to live?