It was supposed to close the north-south divide and boost the economy, but 20 years late the high-speed rail project is in tatters. What went wrong?
That’s all we need to know about it. Government cannot do infrastructure.
It was supposed to close the north-south divide and boost the economy, but 20 years late the high-speed rail project is in tatters. What went wrong?
That’s all we need to know about it. Government cannot do infrastructure.
It’s “working as designed”. A useful phrase I picked up in the IT world. It has many meanings.
Even if it had been built on time, it’s Underpants Gnomes.
Build Rail -> ? -> Profit!
Something that very few ministers, activists, commentators understand is where rail is a good idea. Really, people want to go by car. But there’s a few places where cars are a bad choice. Travelling around in a really dense city (which is literally only London in the UK), travelling into a dense city at peak time, and to cover really long distances where driving would be exhausting.
“In the end, HS2’s supporters in the new coalition government, including the chancellor, George Osborne, decided that if a new line was to be built it should be the best in class — and therefore fast. Journeys between London and Birmingham would be cut from an hour and 24 minutes to 45 minutes. Manchester to London would take just over an hour.”
You see, while 84 to 45 is a good thing, it isn’t of much value. 84 minutes is the “go and see a client for a monthly meeting” journey time. But so is 45 minutes. 45 minutes isn’t the more valuable “commute” where you pack in lots of people. Because door to door is going to be over an hour. So it means someone going to see the client for a meeting gets home 39 minutes earlier, in theory. What’s the value of someone once a month getting to eat with the kids rather than microwaving dinner?
The value comes from tipping speed over into a different type. Like they don’t even make much money, but the French TGVs are so much faster than what went before that they compete with airlines. Door to door, Paris to Bordeaux is faster by train. You can do a client meeting and back in the same day, at a push. So, no staying away from the family, no need to pay for a hotel. That’s the way people think. If I get a call from a potential client and they’re 2 hours away, I don’t think of it any different to a 1 hour client. 4 hours? Well, now I need to pay for a hotel. Is it worth the trip?
There was a lot of “helping the north” about this, like all those run down areas like Barnsley and Oldham. But the problem is, you have to get from Oldham to Manchester first. Get to the station, train to Manchester. Wait for the train to London. Which is one of the other things no-one gets. Rail connections really fuck up rail times. Like, there’s barely any difference between Swindon to Disneyland Paris by train or car. Because car doesn’t have much waiting for connections on that route. Train is: wait for a taxi, wait at Swindon, wait for tube to St Pancras. Wait for Eurostar. Wait for metros in Paris. With car, there’s 1, which is getting onto Le Shuttle. Most of the journey is on some fast trains: Swindon to London, London to Paris. But the waiting eats into the time. Those 2 trains are just over 3 hours, but the door to door time is 6 hours. You can drive it in 7. And the total journey cost for a family is about £300 instead of about £1000 by train.
Everyone thinks of journeys like “London to Manchester” but many, perhaps most journeys aren’t precisely “London to Manchester”. They might be St Albans to Manchester. People leave from their homes, in the suburbs. And/Or, “Manchester” might mean a company in Stockport or Wythenshawe just outside. And that connection can make all the difference. The car might be faster. And of course, when you’re done with your meeting, you aren’t waiting for the next train. You drive.
It’s why this East-West Rail scheme is so stupid. “we can connect all the science and tech between Oxford and Cambridge”. Yes, “Oxford” has a load of medicine/pharma stuff. But it isn’t Oxford proper. It isn’t near the station. It’s the Oxford Science Park, half an hour out. It’s Culham and Abingdon which get lumped in with the thinking about the whole oxford biosciences. No-one does much work in the centre of Oxford because it’s full of fantatical NIMBYs and old churches that you can’t knock down. Oxford, near the station, is some bits of the university, housing and tourist tat shops. The medical parts of Oxford are mostly over in Headington, which is again, about 30 minutes out. For all of this, if you are coming from Cambridge (and, you probably are not going to be leaving from next door to Cambridge station), it’s going to be quicker to drive.
Replace infrastructure with the word anything and that statement is spot on.
Government fucks up everything it touches.
The case for building HS2 never made sense. There are numerous times when it should have been cancelled but it seems to be unstoppable. Should have built a pyramid, at least it would look impressive.
High speed rail makes no sense over short distances – like having a Concorde service between London and Leeds.
The Inter-City 125 cut journey times, not because it travelled at 125mph… it rarely did… but because it had fast acceleration and enhanced braking system which meant it could reach its cruising speed quickly and maintain it longer between stops.
A high speed train over short distances, if ever it reaches high speed, would have to start slowing down almost immediately, thus the overall average speed would be about the same as conventional train sets.
TGV services in France are on long routes: eg Paris-Bordeaux; Paris-Lyons. The latter service continues down to Perpignan but not at high speed because the distances between stops from Lyons to Perpignan are too short.
It is clear particularly from the Net Zero escapade, that politicians live in a fantasy World where economics and physics don’t exist.
The “economic” argument for H2S is business travellers would spend less time away from productive use of their time, but with modern communications, wi-fi, Internet, time spent on trains, planes at airport is in many cases more productive than in the work place due to fewer distractions.
Can anybody name a choo choo built in the last 50 years that was on time or on budget? Bueller? Anyone?
As many of our wise colleagues have noted: there was never a true business case for HS2. Vaguely, with a stretch of imagination, one could argue on capacity grounds. Even that could have been solved with a conventional track that took freight off of the main line.
Quite simply the distances involved are not great enough.
From London to Manchester or York is a couple of hours. That really is nothing in business terms. The advantage of trains is that the passenger can have a pint or a snooze or even do some work instead of worrying if the BMW in front is a cop.
This stemmed from the Trans Europe network of which HS1 was the beginning. It got kicked around because the business case didn’t fly and there was too much local opposition. Johnson approved it solely because construction firms had been sitting around waiting for the green light for years and as they were mostly Tory donors, they had to get going or go bust.
The whole farrago is an utter disgrace and a shameful waste of resources.
ps HS1 is a great service, but it loses its value once past Ashford. It stops everywhere along the Kent coast and Medway towns. And it is needlessly expensive.
“working as designed”
Indeed
Contractors, builders, consultants and planners have made a fortune
So many brown envelopes
“We can’t cancel HS2 because the contracts have been signed” we’re told.
Yet the new boss has uncovered widespread fraud among the contractors.
If the contractors are fraudulent, then the contract should be voided.
So bye bye HS2.
WB: The “some remote station to some remote station” thing is why I was with a group of people in Sheffield saying it was madness proposing HS2 “served” Sheffield by going through a station somewhere out at Orgreave. We campaigned to get it to actually go through the actual Sheffield city station actually in actual Sheffield.
Having an HS2 station at Orgreave would mean – as you say – everybody having to get a bus into Sheffield, then get another bus out to Orgreave to get the HS2. Nobody would be putting on bus services from every single suburb of Sheffield to Orgreave, the existing Sheffield/Rotherham bus routes would be jiggled a bit to serve Orgreave.
If you’re faced with getting a bus into Sheffield, and then another bus to the railway station, you may as well just walk across the road from the Sheffield bus station to Sheffield City railway station and get the normal choo choo.
Plus – other than a constriction at the station where the train would be slow while setting off anyway – the whole Sheffield route used to be four-track or more until the second pair was ripped up in the 70s/80s, and the trackbed is still there, so they could have just put the second set of twin tracks back as dedicated line.
Esteban: yes, in the Far East. Betcha the Chinese high speed rail is all on time and budget. Shinkansen, too.
Following on from my comment, tomorrow I have to go to Doncaster to collect a car.
“Oooooo, get the train…..”
Yebbut, I’d have to get a bus *into* Sheffield to walk to the train station to get a train to Doncaster to get a bus out of Doncaster to the car showroom.
Or….. I get the bus into Sheffield that I would have to anyway, and AT THE BUS STATION THAT THE BUS GOES TO get on the the bus to Doncaster…. which passes the out-of-town car salesroom on the way to Doncaster town centre. Trains work if you live next to the railway station and all your destinations are other railway stations.
Ottokring,
“As many of our wise colleagues have noted: there was never a true business case for HS2. Vaguely, with a stretch of imagination, one could argue on capacity grounds. Even that could have been solved with a conventional track that took freight off of the main line.”
There are two problems with “capacity”. Firstly, there are trainspotters who just want more trainlines, even where they aren’t useful. “well, if we build HS2 we can have more trains from Ludlow to Birmingham” as if that warrants a train rather than a coach, or people driving. Create a coach road into Birmingham to avoid congestion and you’re done.
Secondly, most “capacity” problems are because of poor pricing. That the “off-peak” price is the same from 11am to 4pm, 6:30pm to 11pm, every day of the week, every day of the year. So you can get an overcrowded train from Coventry to Oxford sometimes, but also, trains that are so empty you have a choice of many empty tables. So in general, people buy a ticket and take the 3pm. Or the 7pm. It’s the same price if Rammstein are playing at the stadium than the week before, so no-one gets a price signal to go to the cathedral the next week.
If you say to people that it’s £30 to go at 6:30pm, £20 at 8pm, £15 at 10pm, sure, a lot of business people will still go. But students who don’t have much cash will take the 10pm. Someone might decide to go see a movie after work and spend the £10 saving on a drink and popcorn.
And most annoying about this, it would actually do what the government bangs on about: getting people out of cars. If a train costs £50 from Reading to Cardiff return, and it’s £35 in fuel, people are going to drive. Even though there are lots of empty seats. Drop the price on empty trains to £25, people would get on the train instead.
It’s why we have the whole bizarro thing of “it’s cheaper to fly than take a train”. Actually, often, it isn’t. But Easyjet and Ryanair like to fill empty seats and they’ll take a tenner if that’s all they can get. And if you hit Skyscanner and you’re prepared to be flexible, you can do Rome for £50 return.
jgh,
“Trains work if you live next to the railway station and all your destinations are other railway stations.”
Trains and buses are also useful if you don’t need to travel much. You get into the trade-off of more expensive/less convenient journeys and the fixed running costs. Like I have to see a client in Stoke. It’s going to cost £100 instead of £45. Plus faff to and from station. And probably less reliability than a car. But, I’m also not spending out £100-200/month on running costs of a car.
That’s not advocating for trains, just that the numbers can vary.
The Times also mentions that HS2 may be further ‘downspeeded’. It started at 400kph – all the line is still capable of this speed, but not the trains which are currently planned to be restricted to 350kph, but they could be 320kph versions. This would completely eliminate any time saving, given that the Brum terminus at Curzon St is 15 minutes outside the city centre and New St/Moor St/ Snow Hill for onward connections.
Can anybody name a choo choo built in the last 50 years that was on time or on budget? Bueller? Anyone?
China would claim numerous high-speed lines built in the last decade. But the timetable and budget are a little ‘opaque’.
HS1 is a great service, but it loses its value once past Ashford. It stops everywhere along the Kent coast and Medway towns.
The Javelins leave HS1 at Ashford and then trundle around the Kent coast at ‘normal’ commuter train speeds to Ebbsfleet where they rejoin HS1 for the journey back to St Pancras at their maximum 225kph. (They also run in the reverse direction: StP-Ebbsfleet-Margate-Ashford-StP.)
@ philip
I note that not one single contractor has been named as fraudulent nor a single civil servant who has been bribed