More Delay for HS2, and how should we proceed?

[The Ham]

They've spent 20B already for a half built phase 1 and prep works for phase 2. Even with the hyper NR costs these days that could have provided plenty of enhancements around our major cities. It would be interesting to see whether the Northern Mayors would have wanted the money spent on HS2 or given to them for local transport improvements. The other wider issue here is how DafT have allowed this project to just spiral so far out of control despite its being filled with an army of consultants.

The problem isn't really DafT, rather it's the is it isn't it from the top.

For example, the 6 month review process whilst Johnson looked at it won't have helped (for example we could have been 6 months further through the build process, and the reduced costs due to inflation and other factors).

I've asked before, and been met with radio silence, since the HS2 budget was set what costs have spiralled?

Yes Euston had doubled, but if everything else is more or less on track that means that costs have gone up by about 5% overall. Even if all the other costs have gone up by an average of 5%, total costs would still only be up by about 10%.

== Doublepost prevention - post automatically merged: 2 Oct 2023 ==

When you account for the topography, is it really that much less? The ballast looks to be twice as wide as the final width, I think the perspective and confirmation bias may be playing tricks here. Also worth pointing out a fair amount of that first half looks to be on viaducts, which take up inherently less land than tunnelling but were politically unfavoured if tunnels were an option.

I thought a very similar thing when I saw it. Compare for example the width of the dual carriageway near the start of the video.

Likewise when you see vehicles driving along sections of it, they are tiny compared to the width of the route.

 

[stuu]

When you account for the topography, is it really that much less? The ballast looks to be twice as wide as the final width, I think the perspective and confirmation bias may be playing tricks here. Also worth pointing out a fair amount of that first half looks to be on viaducts, which take up inherently less land than tunnelling but were politically unfavoured if tunnels were an option.

Have a look at any of the drone videos posted in the construction threads. There are miles and miles of the route where a 3-400m wide zone has been dug out. Vastly more than anything in this video, which is around 50-60m wide

You can measure the distances on satellite images, you can also look at the construction plans. It's definitely not confirmation bias or perspective playing a trick. That's quite insulting

 

[BrianW]

Have a look at any of the drone videos posted in the construction threads. There are miles and miles of the route where a 3-400m wide zone has been dug out. Vastly more than anything in this video, which is around 50-60m wide

You can measure the distances on satellite images, you can also look at the construction plans. It's definitely not confirmation bias or perspective playing a trick. That's quite insulting

Perhaps it's more that folk have a tendency to use selectively (whether or not consciously) evidence which is supportive of their decided position. There must be a scientific name for that bias. Such tends to come to the fore when one feels, however unreasonably, under attack. I find it hard to believe that anyone spends money unnecessarily, esp when needing to account for it. One may of course debate the depth of scrutiny, and time spent on it.

 

[zwk500]

Have a look at any of the drone videos posted in the construction threads. There are miles and miles of the route where a 3-400m wide zone has been dug out. Vastly more than anything in this video, which is around 50-60m wide

You can measure the distances on satellite images, you can also look at the construction plans. It's definitely not confirmation bias or perspective playing a trick. That's quite insulting

Are you comparing like for like though? That Italy line is through a land with barely any elevation change at all, HS2 is through a number of areas with substantial hills and so the earthworks will naturally take more land if they are to a greater height/depth.

 

[HSTEd]

They've spent 20B already for a half built phase 1 and prep works for phase 2. Even with the hyper NR costs these days that could have provided plenty of enhancements around our major cities. It would be interesting to see whether the Northern Mayors would have wanted the money spent on HS2 or given to them for local transport improvements.

You'd buy a tonne of transport improvements and then they'd sit idle because you wouldn't have any subsidies to pay for operating them.
Once you account for the future operating cost claims you are making on the public purse the amount of infrastructure you can get will shrink drastically.

The other wider issue here is how DafT have allowed this project to just spiral so far out of control despite its being filled with an army of consultants.

Consultants don't help you save money.
They don't care if the project comes in on time, on budget or anything else.

All they care about is running up the billable hours and making money.

== Doublepost prevention - post automatically merged: 2 Oct 2023 ==

When you account for the topography, is it really that much less? The ballast looks to be twice as wide as the final width, I think the perspective and confirmation bias may be playing tricks here. Also worth pointing out a fair amount of that first half looks to be on viaducts, which take up inherently less land than tunnelling but were politically unfavoured if tunnels were an option.

There wasn't really a need for any surface running on HS2 at all. (I assume yo umean less land than surface construction, because tunnels obviously require less land take than viaducts).

It should all have been on viaducts or in tunnels.

== Doublepost prevention - post automatically merged: 2 Oct 2023 ==

Are you comparing like for like though? That Italy line is through a land with barely any elevation change at all, HS2 is through a number of areas with substantial hills and so the earthworks will naturally take more land if they are to a greater height/depth.

The height changes are greater than Italy but hardly enough to seriously trouble a high speed railway, which are now capable of operating up sustained 4% gradients!

As for earthworks, large embankments are a deliberate design choice these days, as opposed to a concrete viaduct.
We've had whistleblowers claiming that HS2 assumed zero land value in its designs, and I think that jives very much with what we've seen from observation of the building site.

 

[Nicholas Lewis]

Perhaps it's more that folk have a tendency to use selectively (whether or not consciously) evidence which is supportive of their decided position. There must be a scientific name for that bias. Such tends to come to the fore when one feels, however unreasonably, under attack. I find it hard to believe that anyone spends money unnecessarily, esp when needing to account for it. One may of course debate the depth of scrutiny, and time spent on it.

lets get real very little public transport pays its way in UK directly its what it enables that matters and outside of MerseyRail all our regional cities transport system are decades behind there European counterparts. Germany built out its S Bahn networks years before it worried about high speed as that benefits local economies far better.

 

[stuu]

Are you comparing like for like though? That Italy line is through a land with barely any elevation change at all, HS2 is through a number of areas with substantial hills and so the earthworks will naturally take more land if they are to a greater height/depth.

Hs2 has been deliberately, as part of it's design, incorporated significant earth moving in order to hide the railway and deal with noise. I wasn't aware this was even a matter for debate - the amount of earth being moved is vastly more than is necessary for the formation alone.

Its nothing to with topography, which for most of the way north of the Chilterns to Birmingham is pretty benign, around Aylesbury is as flat as anywhere in that part of Italy

 

[al78]

Perhaps it's more that folk have a tendency to use selectively (whether or not consciously) evidence which is supportive of their decided position. There must be a scientific name for that bias. Such tends to come to the fore when one feels, however unreasonably, under attack. I find it hard to believe that anyone spends money unnecessarily, esp when needing to account for it. One may of course debate the depth of scrutiny, and time spent on it.

Confirmation bias.

 

[HSTEd]

Hs2 has been deliberately, as part of it's design, incorporated significant earth moving in order to hide the railway and deal with noise. I wasn't aware this was even a matter for debate - the amount of earth being moved is vastly more than is necessary for the formation alone.

The land value scandal probably hasn't helped.

However if they actually wanted to deal with noise, fitting noise barriers along the entire length would probably be way cheaper than moving literal mountains worth of earth around.

 

[The Ham]

We've had whistleblowers claiming that HS2 assumed zero land value in its designs,

At first glance this could be an issue, however as I've said before there's a few factors which could come into play.

First up, extra land in urban areas could cost £0 if you only need a bit of someone's garden, especially if you buy the house rent it for a few years until building actually happens and then once complete sell the house.

Even if you have to demolish buildings, again to only use part of the overall land, there's the potential to sell off the extra land (ideally with planning permission, but at the very least with the site in the local plan for development - which should be easy to get as it's brown field development), that likely to recover a lot of costs, especially if it was something like mostly open yards and you then can build a large industrial shed on it or better still housing.

In rural areas the cost of land is fairly cheap, not free, but if you need an area of land only during construction you have two options buy it or lease it, the cost difference is probably fairly small. Therefore if there's been an allowance for the lease of the land the extra to buy probably isn't that different.

Again, it could be that the land could be sold off as horse paddocks for more than the cost of farmland, or again there's scope to use that land (rather than buying other land) for tree planting (for example the budget has a line for "buy 100 acres for tree planting" if you've brought rather than leased 99 acres of land, you can use that for your tree planting rather than buying other land, but the cost is already listed in one area so the cost of the extra land purchase is £0 as it's £x elsewhere), or there's the possibility of other development (for example solar farm), which may recover most of the costs of the purchase of the land (close enough that the least costs aren't much different).

 

[Fazaar1889]

So is it Crewe to Manchester that has been scrapped or is it all of Birmingham to Manchester? If so, what does that mean for the big junction outside Birmingham? Are they just removing that as well or does the track connect to something between Crewe and Birmingham?

 

[stuu]

So is it Crewe to Manchester that has been scrapped or is it all of Birmingham to Manchester? If so, what does that mean for the big junction outside Birmingham? Are they just removing that as well or does the track connect to something between Crewe and Birmingham?

No one knows. It would be absolute idiocy to not build at least as far as the WCML, but absolute idiocy is the one thing there isn't currently a shortage of

 

[BrianW]

Confirmation bias.

Thank you al78.

 

[BRX]

So is it Crewe to Manchester that has been scrapped or is it all of Birmingham to Manchester? If so, what does that mean for the big junction outside Birmingham? Are they just removing that as well or does the track connect to something between Crewe and Birmingham?

They haven't actually announced anything at all yet - although many of the main news outlets seem to be working hard to make it seem as if they have.

 

[BrianW]

Consultants don't help you save money.
They don't care if the project comes in on time, on budget or anything else.

All they care about is running up the billable hours and making money.

Consultants, politicians, people generally, tend to believe that they have people's best interests at heart, and that 'the best option' corresponds with their own deeply held beliefs. I recognise that consultants, having been one in another field, like to be able to give their clients what they want to hear, and may be called in when the client is not being heard, and they think that the client will listen to, and act upon, the consultant- esp having paid out for the best independent consultants money can buy

 

[HSTEd]

At first glance this could be an issue, however as I've said before there's a few factors which could come into play.

First up, extra land in urban areas could cost £0 if you only need a bit of someone's garden, especially if you buy the house rent it for a few years until building actually happens and then once complete sell the house.

Even if you have to demolish buildings, again to only use part of the overall land, there's the potential to sell off the extra land (ideally with planning permission, but at the very least with the site in the local plan for development - which should be easy to get as it's brown field development), that likely to recover a lot of costs, especially if it was something like mostly open yards and you then can build a large industrial shed on it or better still housing.

In rural areas the cost of land is fairly cheap, not free, but if you need an area of land only during construction you have two options buy it or lease it, the cost difference is probably fairly small. Therefore if there's been an allowance for the lease of the land the extra to buy probably isn't that different.

Again, it could be that the land could be sold off as horse paddocks for more than the cost of farmland, or again there's scope to use that land (rather than buying other land) for tree planting (for example the budget has a line for "buy 100 acres for tree planting" if you've brought rather than leased 99 acres of land, you can use that for your tree planting rather than buying other land, but the cost is already listed in one area so the cost of the extra land purchase is £0 as it's £x elsewhere), or there's the possibility of other development (for example solar farm), which may recover most of the costs of the purchase of the land (close enough that the least costs aren't much different).

You can't make money from selling off compulsorily purchased land by granting planning permission on it.

Any uplift from the granting of the planning permission is required to be pretty much entirely transferred to the original owner.

Additionally this model discounts transaction costs that are dominant when compulsorily purchasing low value land.
The costs associated with seizing it cannot be recovered.

 

[Dan G]

So is it Crewe to Manchester that has been scrapped or is it all of Birmingham to Manchester? If so, what does that mean for the big junction outside Birmingham? Are they just removing that as well or does the track connect to something between Crewe and Birmingham?

Birmingham northwards.

== Doublepost prevention - post automatically merged: 3 Oct 2023 ==

It's an open secret that Sunak wants to cancel it to fund tax cuts; what's less clear is that the Cabinet agrees.

 

[chris2]

So is it Crewe to Manchester that has been scrapped or is it all of Birmingham to Manchester? If so, what does that mean for the big junction outside Birmingham? Are they just removing that as well or does the track connect to something between Crewe and Birmingham?

The media generally refer to phase 1 as going to Birmingham, but this is technically wrong. Phase 1 includes the delta junction at Water Orton and many miles of track northwards before ending north of Lichfield. The connection options at this point are onto the WCML at Handsacre and/or continuation into Phase 2A (to Crewe).

Construction along this route is as advanced as in other locations with various bridge projects across trunk roads and railways having already been completed.

It’s not clear whether the cancellation includes 2A as well as 2B.

 

[The Planner]

The media generally refer to phase 1 as going to Birmingham, but this is technically wrong. Phase 1 includes the delta junction at Water Orton and many miles of track northwards before ending north of Lichfield. The connection options at this point are onto the WCML at Handsacre and/or continuation into Phase 2A (to Crewe).

Construction along this route is as advanced as in other locations with various bridge projects across trunk roads and railways having already been completed.

It’s not clear whether the cancellation includes 2A as well as 2B.

To be fair, north of the Marston Box over the M42, its pretty much dead now in terms of activity.

 

[Nottingham59]

Construction along this route is as advanced as in other locations with various bridge projects across trunk roads and railways having already been completed.

True, but I understand that construction has started only as far as the point of divergence between phase 2A and the Handsacre link

 

[chris2]

True, but I understand that construction has started only as far as the point of divergence between phase 2A and the Handsacre link

Yes but that's a pretty significant distance north - nearly 16 miles from Delta Junction. All of this plus the junction itself are pointless without a connection to WCML or Phase 2A.

 

[Nottingham59]

Yes but that's a pretty significant distance north - nearly 16 miles from Delta Junction. All of this plus the junction itself are pointless without a connection to WCML or Phase 2A.

Of course. My point is they seem to be keeping open the options of just Crewe or just Handsacre or both.

 

[The Ham]

You can't make money from selling off compulsorily purchased land by granting planning permission on it.

Any uplift from the granting of the planning permission is required to be pretty much entirely transferred to the original owner.

Additionally this model discounts transaction costs that are dominant when compulsorily purchasing low value land.
The costs associated with seizing it cannot be recovered.

What about the extra land/property that people have sold because they want to (blighted property)?

 

[SCDR_WMR]

So it's looking like Handsacre will survive and trains will run on current tracks from there to Manchester. Hopefully Delta is built in full and the split at Handsacre so that 2A can be added later.

Is there even any capacity at Piccadilly for these services? Or will this just simply be a Pendolino replacement?

At least Euston seems to be getting a stay of execution (for now).

 

[350401]

So it's looking like Handsacre will survive and trains will run on current tracks from there to Manchester. Hopefully Delta is built in full and the split at Handsacre so that 2A can be added later.

Is there even any capacity at Piccadilly for these services? Or will this just simply be a Pendolino replacement?

At least Euston seems to be getting a stay of execution (for now).

These will be the 200m classic compatible trains; possibly lengthened to 250m or 275m (pure speculation) to take advantage of the perform length at Piccadilly/Stockport. Run at WCML line speeds to Handsacre then 360kph for the run into OOC and Euston.

 

[MTR380A]

How many minutes will it take to go from Euston to Piccadilly according to the latest plan?

I understand that Phase 2a costs less than 10bn but would save everybody north of Crewe 10 mins. Shouldn't it be built based on its own merit?

P.S. my first post on this forum

 

[350401]

How many minutes will it take to go from Euston to Piccadilly according to the latest plan?

I understand that Phase 2a costs less than 10bn but would save everybody north of Crewe 10 mins. Shouldn't it be built based on its own merit?

P.S. my first post on this forum

Euston to Piccadilly via Handsacre, joining the WCML there, and stopping at Stockport and Piccadilly, is expected to take 1hour 40. 2a reduces this to 1 hour 30. For comparison, current journey times vary from 2hours 6 to 2hours 14.

 

[MTR380A]

Euston to Piccadilly via Handsacre, joining the WCML there, and stopping at Stockport and Piccadilly, is expected to take 1hour 40. 2a reduces this to 1 hour 30. For comparison, current journey times vary from 2hours 6 to 2hours 14.

Thanks! Wonder if the current fast trains over WCML will be moved to the new HS2, so Milton Keynes can still get extra trains as originally envisaged by the time Euston opens?

 

[slowroad]

Euston to Piccadilly via Handsacre, joining the WCML there, and stopping at Stockport and Piccadilly, is expected to take 1hour 40. 2a reduces this to 1 hour 30. For comparison, current journey times vary from 2hours 6 to 2hours 14.

With in cab signalling, could the line speed increase on WCML north of Handsacre be increased?

 

[HSTEd]

I understand that Phase 2a costs less than 10bn but would save everybody north of Crewe 10 mins. Shouldn't it be built based on its own merit?

Assuming there is no future cost escalation, and even then a billion a minute is a lot.