High Speed Two (HS2) discussion

[The Ham]

Projects don't just neatly start and stop in synch with Control Periods, as you imply above - a typical major project, including all the GRIP stages, could easily appear in three CPs from first expenditure on design to final tying up as built information and drawings.

No business could operate in such a way with out massive amounts of waste and/or nothing happening for large chunks of time.

 

[HSTEd]

No business could operate in such a way with out massive amounts of waste and/or nothing happening for large chunks of time.

Just before my father was made redundant from the Sema Office in Nottingham (ex- British Rail Business Systems?) one of his last jobs was to put in a communications line to support the development of Crossrail, which at that time had spent something like a billion pounds.

He asked the liason what they had actually done so far, he apparently said nothing for a few seconds and then answered "not that much actually".

Planning and obtaining legal consents is the time consuming part of the project, you have to fight every homeowner or businessman who demands more tha he is offered for his building ro tries to save it no matter what the cost.

 

[Teaboy1]

Even if we are quibbling over the 2.5% annual growth rates, the result of twenty years of such increases really does make me think that there's no real alternative to HS2 - we can't simply "make do and mend" when confronted with that kind of pressure on existing networks.

Now while I am a rail supporter, I simply cannot see, for the life of me, how the ruling Tory party can do the biggest political u-turn since ..... well since Oliver Cromwell and he incidentially was not Tory. To press ahead with HS2 as it stands on paper at the moment is simply 'Conservative' sucide IMHO. Those Torys advocating 'conservatism' have lost the plot, how can they conserve what we have by building HS2??

Let me state that HS2 will NOT affect my property nor will I actually be able to hear it/ see in my corner but think of those thousands whos lives will be blighted by the route and its consequnces on what bit of country we have.

Biggest political kick in the nethers for the silent majority IMHO, betrays every 'Conservative' principle ever, more akin to 1960's Wilson Labour tactics.

Use/modernise/expand/improve what we have ... and DONT let NotWork Rail have any say in the matter!!! There is enough land to make existing routes quad and high speed IMHO without wholesale financial lunacy!

 

[The Ham]

....but think of those thousands whos lives will be blighted by the route and its consequnces on what bit of country we have.

...There is enough land to make existing routes quad and high speed IMHO without wholesale financial lunacy!

So your proposal means that rather than upset a few thousand people by going through mostly farmland HS2 should upset 10s of thousands of people by going through built up areas.

Also it should be noted that for a long way out of London our main lines (WCML, SWML, EXML, GWML, etc.) are already quad track with maybe the odd pinch point down to double track for a short period for a viaduct or a tunnel, which only has a limited impact on the capacity of the line.

Therefore to increase the number of lines out of London you are talking about increasing the lines to six tracks, now that is going to be nice and cheap when you have to rebuild vitally every bridge, tunnel, viaduct, railway junction and station along the route.

You also may wish to read this article bout the amount of urban land in the UK:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-18623096

Having looked at all the information, they calculated that "6.8% of the UK's land area is now classified as urban" (a definition that includes rural development and roads, by the way).

The urban landscape accounts for 10.6% of England, 1.9% of Scotland, 3.6% of Northern Ireland and 4.1% of Wales.

Put another way, that means almost 93% of the UK is not urban. But even that isn't the end of the story because urban is not the same as built on.

In urban England, for example, the researchers found that just over half the land (54%) in our towns and cities is greenspace - parks, allotments, sports pitches and so on.

Furthermore, domestic gardens account for another 18% of urban land use; rivers, canals, lakes and reservoirs an additional 6.6%.

Now I think that we should not go ripping through the country side to build until we run out of space, far from it, however we also can't not build anything in the countryside either. It is much better to build a new railway line which can run 18 trains an hour in each direction each easily carrying 1,000 passengers, an hourly flow of 18,000 people, rather than build a new motorway which even at 4 lanes wide and able to carry 1800 vehicles per lane an hour would mean an average occupancy rate of 4.25 people per vehicle to get close to the capacity of the rail lane.

 

[tbtc]

Use/modernise/expand/improve what we have ... and DONT let NotWork Rail have any say in the matter!!! There is enough land to make existing routes quad and high speed IMHO without wholesale financial lunacy!

Nobody has convinced me that its feasible to increase capacity in the way that you suggest though - most lines into London are four track with many trains 200 metres long (or longer).

You can't increase speed on existing lines easily as there's freight in the way.

Its a bit like not being able to upgrade the A road network fifty years previously, so we built motorways instead of disrupting existing roads (and trying to squeeze more traffic onto them).

 

[HSTEd]

Good luck building the equivalent of two extra tracks each to Birmingham, Manchester and Leeds that will get traevl times anywhere near what we propose for less than £33bn.

(That is what it would require to match HS2s capacity using classic compatible trains of the normal British length).

This is the cheap way to build new rail capacity, as it can be built by general construction workers without all the horrendously expensive and disruptive safety requirements imposed by working on an active railway.

 

[The Ham]

In case anyone hasn't seen this:
http://www.railnews.co.uk/news/2013/02/24-surprise-boost-for-hs2-to.html

PLANS to build HS2 have been given a boost by a Government announcement that it intends to promote a Paving Bill in the next session of Parliament. The transport secretary has reaffirmed his own commitment to the scheme by hailing it as 'an engine for growth'.

The new law is intended to give the transport secretary powers to raise some early funding for the project, and Whitehall insiders say the measure is set to be included in the Queen's Speech in May, when she will reveal the Government's forthcoming legislative programme.

It had been thought that the HS2 project would have to wait for a major Hybrid Bill, but this interim measure will allow the transport secretary to make progress ahead of the main Bill. Assuming that it is passed, a Paving Bill also allows Parliament to signal its approval.

Most significantly of all, a successful Bill would convert HS2 from the status of 'if' to 'when', providing for the construction of Phases 1 and 2 and also accelerating the plans for Phase 3, which is to close the gap between the north of England and Scotland.

The Government has announced its intentions before the result of December's judicial review into the scheme is revealed, but sources say even an adverse judgement about some of the details of the consultation, in which several hundred responses were overlooked, is not expected to derail the project.

The spending powers which the Government is seeking would finance detailed design work and the letting of contracts for designing the construction of the line, planning the realignment of existing railways and rerouting utilities, and also carrying out ground investigation and ecological surveys.

 

[Chris125]

Fantastic news, no doubt to the great annoyance of those who think that pushing the Hybrid Bill into the next parliament is magically going to lead to it's cancellation.

Chris

 

[The Ham]

No wonder there are a lot of people who dislike the though of HS2, given what some of the press are saying about it, a rebuttal to:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/a...HS2-worst-waste-public-money-generations.html

The new railway will do nothing for the recession, be voracious of carbon and do little to ease road congestion. To be remotely commercial, it must charge high fares — projected to rise at 27 per cent over inflation — and be largely a replacement service for business travellers from Euston, whose first-class carriages are often near empty.

Building a railway may not have much of a direct benefit on traffic levels on roads? Really, given the amount of people that can be carried on one train or the number of lorries that can be removed from the roads by one train (freight trains would be on the existing network in the gaps freed up by HS2), I find this impossible to believe.

A rise of 27% between now and 2026 is about 1.5% above inflation year on year, which is about what all rail fares are doing and I would be surprised if other transport costs don't go up by a similar amount. Therefore the cost of the tickets on HS2 will not be massively inflated compared with other ticket costs.

There is still no published strategy for rail investment in Britain. If there were, HS2 would never survive against electrifying the western region, or improving Britain’s ramshackle cross-country services, or upgrading the intolerable state of most urban commuter services.

What are the RUS's if not published strategies for rail investment in Britain, OK they are not done by government but would anyone trust them more if they were?

Also the two items that are listed are being done in part in CP5, leaving the whole of CP6 and part of CP7 before HS2 is being built. As the line to Bristol and Swansea as well as the line up to Oxford is being electrified which covers the majority of the trains which run on the GWML out of London. This basicly leaves those that run to the South West and these are likely to be electrified (at least to Exeter) by the time HS2 is built. Likewise XC services are likely to see a big boost once EMU's can run from Manchester to the South Coast and from the south to the ECML via the new East West rail line, even before any further projects are undertaken after CP5.

To encourage the poor to travel — a strange objective in a carbon-conscious age — we should improve coaches and roads, the poor man’s highway, which are miserably overcrowded.

Coach travel may well be cheaper for passengers than rail travel, however the majority of people who use the roads do so by car and there are a fair number of them who are not poor. If we, as a country, want to help the poor travel moor on the roads we should be building loads of bus lanes and cycle lanes and making it really difficult to use the private motor car, otherwise all that happens is that the better off just drive more miles clogging up the roads again.

Taxpayers must now find £1bn a year in interest payments alone, so a few rich business people can get to Birmingham half an hour earlier.

This is another scare figure. Yes if we were to borrow £33bn in one chunk the interest payments could be in the order of £1bn, but then we would have the whole HS2 network and it would be more than just 30 minutes between London & Birmingham where train travel would be quicker. In fact even after phase one other locations benefit from better journey times.

Also by the time HS2 is finished the first phase will have been running for a good few years and would have been able to repay a chuck of the money used to build the first phase. Given both First and Virgin where looking to repay about £5bn over a 15 year franchise when they were having to invest heavily to be able to build the level of passenger growth that they were expecting it us not unreasonable to expect a better rate of return for the franchise to run HS2.

However even at the same average rate of £0.333bn per year the first phase would repay some £2bn over the first 6 years and probably significantly more than this once the second phase is built. With the added advantage that if it was leased to someone in the same way the HS1 has been that leased for about £2bn and at the end of the lease has to be returned in the same condition that it was let in (i.e. a nearly new railway line).

 

[Chris125]

No wonder there are a lot of people who dislike the though of HS2, given what some of the press are saying about it, a rebuttal to:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/a...HS2-worst-waste-public-money-generations.html

Simon Jenkins has been writing articles advocating spending on coach travel instead of rail for years, he attacked Crossrail in exactly the same way.

Chris

 

[euryalus]

Now while I am a rail supporter, I simply cannot see, for the life of me, how the ruling Tory party can do the biggest political u-turn since since Oliver Cromwell and he incidentially was not Tory.

I am confused. When did Oliver Cromwell ever make a "U-turn" - his political agenda was always clear (freedom of worship, a limited extension of the franchise and the introduction of a written constitution).

 

[HSTEd]

This might of interest to some people.

An example of a railway charging fares even lower than the ones I suggest through deployment of all second class trains and using secondary parts of the network.

 

[Ironside]

This might of interest to some people.

An example of a railway charging fares even lower than the ones I suggest through deployment of all second class trains and using secondary parts of the network.

Certainly is interesting, but it doubly differenciates from the normal tgv because it doesn't use the main stations, so I wonder who the target market is? Probably not tourists as they will want to go a town centre, so maybe people visiting friends and family as they can get dropped of and picked up by car.

 

[si404]

I can't see a UK version where they only travel between parkway stations existing on HS2 - in part because the French trains only do that to avoid paying the higher costs on the busy classic tracks in cities.

There's also a lack of turn-around options on the High Speed line other than at termini.

 

[HSTEd]

Certainly is interesting, but it doubly differenciates from the normal tgv because it doesn't use the main stations, so I wonder who the target market is? Probably not tourists as they will want to go a town centre, so maybe people visiting friends and family as they can get dropped of and picked up by car.

My guess is that it is people making trips to friends and family and the like, and commuters living in the extended Parisian commuter belt.

Given that the RER Fare to Marne la Valée from "Zone 1" is only ~€8, it may be cheaper even if you are coming from central Paris than the conventional stations.
It is probably more for people who don't care about the inconvenience of changing.


There isn't really anywhere it would be directly applicable to HS2 except perhaps in the context of a future wider high speed network, but it shows just how the marginal costs of high speed operations are.

With ten euro fares for journeys of that length, its not just car and plane users you can go after, you can go after the coach operators as well. (It also ushers in an era of even greater hyper-mobility than people enjoy now).

 

[Xenophon PCDGS]

Its a bit like not being able to upgrade the A road network fifty years previously, so we built motorways instead of disrupting existing roads (and trying to squeeze more traffic onto them).

Looking at the M6 motorway as one of the first motorways to achieve the point you make in your posting, when it was found that a middle section of that motorway needed extra capacity, a new M6 toll road was constructed to give motorists a choice of paying for using this new toll motorway or to stay on the existing motorway at no extra cost.

 

[Teaboy1]

OK I take on the general consensus that new is better than old in the same way as new motorways etc but I still challenge the wisdom that we NEED HS2! Does it really matter that the journey time is a slightly reduced?? Given the mess we find ourselves in now and the price tag [min £32b] I can think of better alternatives we should be spending taxes on ... and these probably wont be mine ... when it comes to construction time. I hate to agree with anything the Daily Moron print but yes its similar to the Concord of its day, its a huge expense for prestigious project that will inevitably benefit very few and inconvenience many.

And lastly, please explain the political repercussions of a Conservative party that is doing the opposite of conserving !! It would be like the socialists selling off the NHS in an inverted-Obama-Care sense.

Sorry but £32b and counting is just too much, £32m would buy an awful lot of new coaching stock that would improve the railway for everyone!! And leave us with 99% of the change!

 

[NSEFAN]

OK I take on the general consensus that new is better than old in the same way as new motorways etc but I still challenge the wisdom that we NEED HS2! Does it really matter that the journey time is a slightly reduced?? Given the mess we find ourselves in now and the price tag [min £32b] I can think of better alternatives we should be spending taxes on ... and these probably wont be mine ... when it comes to construction time. I hate to agree with anything the Daily Moron print but yes its similar to the Concord of its day, its a huge expense for prestigious project that will inevitably benefit very few and inconvenience many.

And lastly, please explain the political repercussions of a Conservative party that is doing the opposite of conserving !! It would be like the socialists selling off the NHS in an inverted-Obama-Care sense.

Sorry but £32b and counting is just too much, £32m would buy an awful lot of new coaching stock that would improve the railway for everyone!! And leave us with 99% of the change!

Whether HS2 is actual high speed or not isn't so important. Just having another set of tracks is what's required for the WCML. Adding these directly onto the current mainline would actually be a lot more disruptive to a lot more people than building a new line through the Chilterns. If you're gonna build a new railway, you might as well do a proper job for not that much extra cost. The fact HS2 will be high speed also allows for sensible proposals for linking in with HS1 to the continent.

Just to put the numbers in context, HS2 is estimated to cost £32 billion for the entire project from London - Leeds and Manchester over several decades. A lot of this money is expected to come from the private sector, so it's not all taxpayer money. Compare that with the fact that we currently spend over £40bn a year on Defence alone which IS all taxpayer money. Personally I know where I'd rather have my tax money go!

I agree that the rest of the network shouldn't be neglected. Plenty of stuff is already happening with regards to the rest of the network. Take a look at Network Rail's plans for Control Period 5 and 6 if you don't believe me.

"Conservative" is synonymous with "right wing", so it doesn't always mean keeping stuff the same. Under the right-wing political ideology, people only pay for what they use. Communal systems like the NHS and subsidy of rural train services are very un-conservative in that sense.

And finally, £32m wouldn't actual buy THAT many trains, given one carriage is well over £1m nowadays. And again, not all of the money going to HS2 is public money, so there would be a fair portion of your "change" missing.

 

[Ironside]

OK I take on the general consensus that new is better than old in the same way as new motorways etc but I still challenge the wisdom that we NEED HS2! Does it really matter that the journey time is a slightly reduced?? Given the mess we find ourselves in now and the price tag [min £32b] I can think of better alternatives we should be spending taxes on ... and these probably wont be mine ... when it comes to construction time. I hate to agree with anything the Daily Moron print but yes its similar to the Concord of its day, its a huge expense for prestigious project that will inevitably benefit very few and inconvenience

Sorry but £32b and counting is just too much, £32m would buy an awful lot of new coaching stock that would improve the railway for everyone!! And leave us with 99% of the change!

Many journeys will nearly halve, so more than a few mins. It will be cheaper to build it for 400 kph now rather than rebuild the route later. Running the line at high speed allows greater capacity moving tens of thousands of people in each direction each hour. The vacant classic lines can repaired properly so they can be used for more stopping services and freight. Oh and HS2 also ensures that the classic lines are maintained and upgraded as they are needed to bring passengers onto the high speed lines.

 

[tbtc]

OK I take on the general consensus that new is better than old in the same way as new motorways etc but I still challenge the wisdom that we NEED HS2! Does it really matter that the journey time is a slightly reduced??

It's about capacity, not speed. The "spending £32bn to save businessmen a couple of minutes from London to Birmingham" argument that others use really misses the point.

You previously said

Use/modernise/expand/improve what we have ... and DONT let NotWork Rail have any say in the matter!!! There is enough land to make existing routes quad and high speed IMHO without wholesale financial lunacy!

...well, HS2 appears to be cheaper than tinkering with existing routes, causing disruption to passengers on existing services... we can't just keep expanding - HS2 is a brand new railway alongside the current one.

Given the mess we find ourselves in now and the price tag [min £32b] I can think of better alternatives we should be spending taxes on ...

If you want the old "we should spend this on the national debt, schools and hospitals and overseas aid" argument then, yes, of course, but then that'd make for a boring railway forum.

If you accept that in twenty years time there may be another ten million people in the UK (with rising life expectancy etc) and that you can't realistically lengthen an eleven vehicle 225/ 390 set or a twelve coach 350 any further then you need to spend big money if you want to meet that increased demand

please explain the political repercussions of a Conservative party that is doing the opposite of conserving !!

The Tory party is really a mix of two things - the economically liberal business wing and the socially conservative "Disgusted of Middle England" wing.

Usually the two sit alongside each other okay because the leaders have been clever enough to feed both sides (like the current Government cutting income tax for the richest 1% and cutting corporation tax, yet also clamping down on "scroungers"/ talking tough on immigration).

HS2 is one of the rare moments where the Tory party has to decide whether its business paymasters are more important or less important than its rank and file membership.

Sorry but £32b and counting is just too much, £32m would buy an awful lot of new coaching stock that would improve the railway for everyone!! And leave us with 99% of the change!

Have you seen the cost of the Todmorden chord? £8m for 500 metres of new track?

If you are serious about tackling capacity between the biggest cities then you'll need billions. Especially if you want to buy trains too (HS2 costs include everything - even the kitchen sinks in the onboard cooking facilities)

 

[The Ham]

Sorry but £32b and counting is just too much, £32m would buy an awful lot of new coaching stock that would improve the railway for everyone!! And leave us with 99% of the change!

£32bn would buy a lot of trains, but other than on a lot of lightly used lines it would not provide the sort of capacity that is likely to be needed over the next 20 years.

For instance if SWT's where given 200 new coaches, very few of them would be able to be used for increasing capacity onto London, and even those that could would involve infrastructure projects to enable many of them to run.

It is hardly like our rail network is running at most 2 to 6 trains an hour each way, many of our lines are straining under the load of the number of trains that are running, with little or no chance of popping one or two more services in or lengthening trains much beyond where they are currently.

 

[Teaboy1]

Oh dear, looks like I am on a sticky-wicket here!! But the old fact remains that it is so so very easy to spend other peoples money on the Treasury Credit card, but who pays in the end??
My final comment is that I personally believe that £32b would be better spent improving what we have and making life for "all" commuters better, not just HS2 customers.
Good luck and Best of British mates !!!

 

[HSTEd]

Oh dear, looks like I am on a sticky-wicket here!! But the old fact remains that it is so so very easy to spend other peoples money on the Treasury Credit card, but who pays in the end??
My final comment is that I personally believe that £32b would be better spent improving what we have and making life for "all" commuters better, not just HS2 customers.
Good luck and Best of British mates !!!

The railway does in theory.

The headline figure is huge, but when you amortise it down over 50-60 years of operational life for the infrastructure or 30-40 years of operational life for the rolling stock, its not actually that much.

Then you have to take into account the frankly absurd number of trains they plan to run.

 

[Geezertronic]

My final comment is that I personally believe that £32b would be better spent improving what we have and making life for "all" commuters better, not just HS2 customers.
Good luck and Best of British mates !!!

If all of the Infrastructure projects took that view, none would have been built. How does CrossRail or Thameslink (or for that matter the M25 or M40) help people in the South West or people up North? How does the A1(M) upgrade work affect me in Birmingham? It doesn't but that is not an excuse for me to suggest it shouldn't happen

And although it has been stated before I'll state it again, there would not be any £32bn without HS2, not even close so the argument that the money should be diverted elsewhere is irrelevant

 

[tbtc]

And although it has been stated before I'll state it again, there would not be any £32bn without HS2, not even close so the argument that the money should be diverted elsewhere is irrelevant

Worth restating this - something that the "anti" brigade tend to miss.

 

[The Ham]

The railway does in theory.

The headline figure is huge, but when you amortise it down over 50-60 years of operational life for the infrastructure or 30-40 years of operational life for the rolling stock, its not actually that much.

Then you have to take into account the frankly absurd number of trains they plan to run.

When you bear in mind that the WCML franchise was willing to pay about £5 billion for a 15 year franchise (with much smaller passenger numbers at the start) on top of the NR charges for the line usage then yes £32bn seams quite a small amount over 50-60 years.

Even just allowing £5bn for each franchise period of 15 years (and the passenger numbers on HS2 are going to be higher than for the WCML alone as it will attract passengers from MML and the ECML as well, in addition to any extra passenger growth which has been forecast to happen) then just the money the government gets back in franchise charges will be £20bn.

Also the thing with government spending is that some of it comes back in the form of extra taxes, from personal taxes and company taxes through to the "little" taxes like fuel duty and VAT. Even if the line was built entirely by companies from abroad with staff and materials from abroad there would still be extra income to the government when the staff used local services (such as accommodation, fuel or food) and the lorries delivering the goods had to fill up with extra fuel to get to the locations they needed to get to.

 

[YorkshireBear]

Teaboy you miss the point entirely. HS2 removes express services from commuter network. 1 pendilino non stop service removed gives space for 2 12 car commuter service on the WCML. So HS2 Will improve life for commuters. Read the thread through the answers to your questions are in there.

 

[The Decapod]

Although as a railway enthusiast the idea of HS2 is interesting and exciting, as each day passes my doubt increases about the sense of building it, considering the huge cost and the inevitable public opposition. Wouldn't the £46 billion or whatever be much better spent on improving the existing network? Anyway, I think HS2 is quite likely to be cancelled before construction work starts.

If all of the Infrastructure projects took that view, none would have been built.

But there's a long list of infrastructure projects that have been cancelled - recently the Severn Barrage, then there's Ringway 1 and Ringway 2 motorways in London (Ringway 3 is the M25). Then there was London's third airport on Maplin Sands, also what would have been Britain's only inland nuclear power station at Denver Sluice in Norfolk.

 

[HSTEd]

Although as a railway enthusiast the idea of HS2 is interesting and exciting, as each day passes my doubt increases about the sense of building it, considering the huge cost and the inevitable public opposition. Wouldn't the £46 billion or whatever be much better spent on improving the existing network? Anyway, I think HS2 is quite likely to be cancelled before construction work starts

Yes, but since this money is borrowed against the future revenues of HS2.... without HS2 there is no money.
More money can be borrowed to pay for other improvements with decent BCRs.

 

[John07]

But there's a long list of infrastructure projects that have been cancelled - recently the Severn Barrage, then there's Ringway 1 and Ringway 2 motorways in London (Ringway 3 is the M25). Then there was London's third airport on Maplin Sands, also what would have been Britain's only inland nuclear power station at Denver Sluice in Norfolk.

The London Motorway system was cancelled in 1973 with few voicing any opposition. Maplin was scrapped in 1974. Both were victims of the economic gloom after the quadrupling of world oil prices.

You missed out the abandonment of the Channel Tunnel in 1975. It was eventually built in the 1990s.

As for the Severn Barrage, I am not aware it ever got beyond a proposal.

The reason for the cancellation of the concentric rings of motorways in Central London and Maplin was that there was no economic basis for them. They were vanity projects from the Edward Heath Government based on a Keynesian demand management approach to expand the economy out of recession. Once they were systematically evaluated using cost-benefit analysis they were scrapped.

That cannot be said about HS2. Admittedly the advantages only arise over longer distances. Hence the London-Birmingham line is marginal in terms of Benefit-Cost Ratios while the London-Manchester/Leeds looks better and London-Edinburgh/Glasgow better still.