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The talent will go to whichever employer offers them the best terms of service and meets the employees personal work/life criteria. For some that may well be a state owned engineering company but for many others it won’t be.
I’m not sure how a state owned engineering company would work in a competitive market (it would win some and lose some surely like any other company), rather I think it would need to be an internal division within the infrastructure (ex Network Rail) side of GBR.
The talent will go to whichever employer offers them the best terms of service and meets the employees personal work/life criteria. For some that may well be a state owned engineering company but for many others it won’t be.
I’m not sure how a state owned engineering company would work in a competitive market (it would win some and lose some surely like any other company), rather I think it would need to be an internal division within the infrastructure (ex Network Rail) side of GBR.
The UK has a large backlog of necessary infrastructure works in the rail sector alone and it's only going to get worse if governments continue to neglect the network and as climate driven extreme weather events get more frequent and more extreme. Work isn't going to dry up any time soon.
In my field (signal testing management/principles testing) I have never known a shortage of work overall, but have ended up working for many different organisations - with all the inefficiencies of getting to know new teams/requirements.
The talent will go to whichever employer offers them the best terms of service and meets the employees personal work/life criteria. For some that may well be a state owned engineering company but for many others it won’t be.
This isn't some poor relief works, it'll be no more than was thought up by NR now. If anything, the more you want done by the inflexible number of people directly employed by the government, the more they are going to spread the work out in time and keep the employee numbers down for efficiency. The point of the contractors is to be reactive to the work requested, not the other way around. That mindset is inescapable, I wouldn't want to try to leave it. In past threads we've talked about the benefit of people learning trades on the railways, then working on football stadiums and other vastly different sites. Is all of that good for the wider, private construction industry going away?
Shortage of cash is a perennial 'issue'. Greast Western electrification is an example- too much of a rush following starvation. HS2 another example- construction started before design was mature.
I'm a 'product' of the times that thought continuous programmes of work (eg electrification) were good, efficient, effective use of 'resources'- it seemed 'obvious' to me, Think how things would be if that had applied to motorway building, to keep Marples and his men in business.
We have to be able to deploy funding where it is most needed, eg spend more on 'social care' and less on transport- we all get old,; how necessary is transport in a digital future, working from home etc?
How effective were Youth Emploment/ Job Creation Schemes/ Regional development/ Economic Subsidies- waht might be seen as economic/market interventions/ distortions/ ...?
They could leave the rail engineering and move to another engineering/other profession. All the big engineering firms are fully international these days so you might be working on projects in other countries but based in the UK. Jobs aren’t for life these days, and for the best/most in demand staff why work for X when Y can pay me double or lets me work from home or gives me better flexibility around picking my kids up from school. Stick certain keywords in your job title in LinkedIn and you get loads of recruitment offers. Whether you’d want to do them is another matter but the point is the only way to keep all the talent in a single organisation is extremely expensive or by slave labour.
I hesitate to say they "got it wrong" – the circumstances 150 to 200 years ago were very different to what they are today. The requirements on a railway when trains can reach the dizzying speeds of 75mph but struggle on any kind of gradient, and civil engineering is done by hand rather than by machine, mean that the route they built probably was the right one for the time. No point in spending lots of money creating a straight line route when your trains can cope with curves easily – planning for a 200mph railway in the middle of the 19th century would be like us building HS2 on a 500mph alignment today, if not even more preposterous.
I did not mean to compare the circumstances 150-200 years ago to what we end up with expecting now. More some perceived ideal infrastructure maybe about 75 years on from the construction phase 150-200 years ago.
One of the biggest problems now is sunk costs – every time we go back to the drawing board, we incur a load more costs. That's why the continued downgrading of the scope never realised any meaningful savings, because if we cut the plan down to something that was ostensibly cheaper to build, the re-design and all associated consultation and legal work had to be done again and negated the savings that could have been made. Any further de-scoping of the project is likely to come up against the same issue – you'll effectively be starting from scratch, but bearing the weight of all the costs of the project so far, and what you'll get out of it will bring significantly fewer benefits than the original plan, making it harder to get through a cost-benefit analysis.
I might add that YouTuber Jago Hazzard suggested having a permanent state-owned civil engineering company so that a civil engineering team doesn't have to be assembled from scratch every time a railway gets built.
Reminds me of that missed rolling program of electrification. Even if that was done at a slower than ideal pace (to allow continuity) it would result in more being done than the current stop start approach.
Is there much point in holding out for advancing HS2 these days? We know that the Tories tried hard to kill it off under Sunak, and Labour seem very unenthusiastic about it, seemingly regarding it as a legacy they reluctantly preside over. No other political Party stands any chance of taking over at the next election, with the possible exception of Reform who have openly stated that they want the whole thing scrapped.
Personally I whole-heartedly support rail advancement even though I maintain that HS2 could and should have been much better designed. However, I fear that discussing much further development of it might be little more than just a bit of intellectual fun. Which I understand and appreciate, but at the same time it's sad that our people and leaders are so unsupportive of rail.
When I made the above comment back in September, I was hoping to be proved wrong, and that I might find people pouring scorn on to my cynicism by demonstrating how things would be progressed more quickly. Back then, the delivery date for our much diminished HS2 project was some time between 2029 and 2033. I've not visited this thread since shortly after that, but now I see this in the recent news ... https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c997d7lkjv8o which states that even the date of 2033 "cannot be met".
I've previously admired the 809 mile Chinese route from Beijing to Shanghai, which was conceived only a short time before HS2 was conceived (then Greengauge21), and then opened to passengers back in 2011. Meanwhile our much truncated HS2, at not much over ONE EIGHTH of the length of this Chinese route now still looks as far away from completion as the Chinese route took from start to finish, despite having been officially announced SEVENTEEN YEARS AGO this month.
How can our system (of political/rail hierarchy interaction) really be seen as credible by the Chinese, or the Japanese, or French, Italians, Germans or Spanish? Oh, and there's also those countries such as Morocco, Indonesia, Saudi Arabia and Turkey which also now have faster internal rail systems than we do in the UK.
I still remain hopeful of being proved wrong with my cynicism of HS2 but it's not looking great ..... !!!
I think any scheme to make a national body more capable is pretty far from being a monopsony for any skill that can be used in the rail construction industry.
It has been a pretty continuous issue that the organisations building almost any major public project in the UK are generally under powered in terms of skills and knowledge and that there are far too many levels of sub contracting.
National bodies are particularly noted for being underpowered in terms of ability to negotiate commercially with the private sector the negotiation being particularly difficult due to said multi tiered sub contracting where many participants make their money by project variance or getting compensation from each other.
The UK construction sector is completely inefficient and not globally competitive. The lack of infrastructure build its stop start nature and our complex planning laws are partially to blame for this.
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One of the biggest problems now is sunk costs – every time we go back to the drawing board, we incur a load more costs. That's why the continued downgrading of the scope never realised any meaningful savings, because if we cut the plan down to something that was ostensibly cheaper to build, the re-design and all associated consultation and legal work had to be done again and negated the savings that could have been made. Any further de-scoping of the project is likely to come up against the same issue – you'll effectively be starting from scratch, but bearing the weight of all the costs of the project so far, and what you'll get out of it will bring significantly fewer benefits than the original plan, making it harder to get through a cost-benefit analysis.
The costs of HS2 and other UK rail projects are so ridiculous (multiples of those seen in other high cost European countries) that the amounts saved by reusing existing design work pale into insignificance compared to the value of doing it efficiently.
The different sector comparison is to compare the SLS and the Falcon 9. The first rocket was built by the existing experienced contractors reusing Space Shuttle hardware, the latter was built from scratch by SpaceX a vertical integrated startup. SLS puts 80 tonnes into orbit for ~$2bn per launch once every 2 years. Falcon 9 launches 15 tonnes for $20m a flight (internal cost), 160 times this year alone.
HS2 will have mountains of paper justifying why every decision that has been made makes sense in the context of the project. The agglomeration of those decisions makes absolutely no financial sense. You need to change the context to be able to unlock all the decisions that could make the project come in at a sensible cost.
There is also the time dimension, HS2 and other UK rail projects take so long that there isn’t actually any time advantage to using the existing framework.
These projects take so long that actually coming up with a good strategic plan (including changing the context or planning system), validating it on a small project and then moving on to more challenging projects won’t actually take more time. See rate of construction in other countries as an example. The government should also look to start-ups as an example, one of the most basic principles of demonstrating something is a minimum viable product where frequently you demonstrate functionality and customer interaction with a completely different back end (frequently just people doing what the product will eventually do). We could actually do plenty of what could be achieved with reform of planning, environmental law, treasury/funding with ministerial over rides and government indemnities which would be a containable risk/cost on a small project.
The point of avoiding the sunk cost fallacy is that past costs can't be unspent and thus should not affect decision-making. Therefore, when comparing continuing with a project's current plan to changing to a new plan, whether the new plan would have been cheaper if chosen from the start isn't relevant; the question to ask is whether switching to the new plan will be cheaper than continuing with the current plan. Thus taking into account the costs of changing to a new plan is not a fallacy at all.
The first rocket was built by the existing experienced contractors reusing Space Shuttle hardware, the latter was built from scratch by SpaceX a vertical integrated startup.
The important thing to note there though was that the SLS was a Government commissioned programme, SpaceX is a completely private publicly listed company with an extremely clear vision and sense of purpose competing for both government funded and privately funded launches. I don’t doubt that a private plc company could build HS2 much cheaper than the government, but would anyone in the country actually be prepared to allow that to happen?
This isn't some poor relief works, it'll be no more than was thought up by NR now. If anything, the more you want done by the inflexible number of people directly employed by the government, the more they are going to spread the work out in time and keep the employee numbers down for efficiency. The point of the contractors is to be reactive to the work requested, not the other way around. That mindset is inescapable, I wouldn't want to try to leave it. In past threads we've talked about the benefit of people learning trades on the railways, then working on football stadiums and other vastly different sites. Is all of that good for the wider, private construction industry going away?
I guess I fundamentally percieve this as a "capability" issue.
Tunnels look increasingly important in getting all kinds of infrastructure built, given they can help overcome arguments from an increasingly vocal and engaged population. That includes railways, roads, water, power lines and any number of other things.
Unfortunately, the high cost of tunnels under the current model discourages their use, requiring us to spend masses of political capital trying to argue our way out of using them. See the HS2 Chiltern Tunnel debacle as an example of direct relevance to this discussion.
I see a continuous pipeline of work, fed to a properly sized infrastructure, as the best way to get a team good enough at building tunnels to make them affordable - because without them we risk continuing with our current infrastructure paralysis.
That's especially true as the pipeline would be able to share spoil disposal, segment manufacturing and other such supporting infrastructure. That would reduce costs as we go along.
The conceptually simplest way I can see to do this is just to employ tunneling people and then have them dig tunnels, we have no shotage of gainful ways to employ them. Trying to build this capability using contractors would require complex juggling to keep multiple contractors operating, avoiding monopolies whilst ensuring none of the competitors become bloated and inefficient.
I guess I fundamentally percieve this as a "capability" issue.
Tunnels look increasingly important in getting all kinds of infrastructure built, given they can help overcome arguments from an increasingly vocal and engaged population. That includes railways, roads, water, power lines and any number of other things.
Unfortunately, the high cost of tunnels under the current model discourages their use, requiring us to spend masses of political capital trying to argue our way out of using them. See the HS2 Chiltern Tunnel debacle as an example of direct relevance to this discussion.
I see a continuous pipeline of work, fed to a properly sized infrastructure, as the best way to get a team good enough at building tunnels to make them affordable - because without them we risk continuing with our current infrastructure paralysis.
That's especially true as the pipeline would be able to share spoil disposal, segment manufacturing and other such supporting infrastructure. That would reduce costs as we go along.
The conceptually simplest way I can see to do this is just to employ tunneling people and then have them dig tunnels, we have no shotage of gainful ways to employ them. Trying to build this capability using contractors would require complex juggling to keep multiple contractors operating, avoiding monopolies whilst ensuring none of the competitors become bloated and inefficient.
Looking at the cost comparators from other countries plenty of people build high speed rail through much more difficult terrain than the south of England and do it for much less money. HS2 doesn't have a particularly high percentage of its length in tunnels.
Looking at the cost comparators from other countries plenty of people build high speed rail through much more difficult terrain than the south of England and do it for much less money. HS2 doesn't have a particularly high percentage of its length in tunnels.
So, why is that? This has been studied. However if you think it's about a kind of 'corruption', 'jobs for the boys', 'gold-plating' too much regulation, etc etc, no study will convince you otherwise.
Carillion did well for a while and went bust. Where are Railtrack now?
What did we learn from Hatfield, Potters Bar, Carmont, Combe, Dawlish, ...?
Looking at the cost comparators from other countries plenty of people build high speed rail through much more difficult terrain than the south of England and do it for much less money. HS2 doesn't have a particularly high percentage of its length in tunnels.
HS2 doesn't have that many tunnels on it, and that is after an enormously expensive political battle that dragged on for years to impose those tunnels. HS2 even tried to propose rebuilding Hangar Lane gyratory to avoid a tunnel, which was never going to fly.
Imagine a counterfactual where the railway is almost entirely in tunnel, and the bulk of the impacts on the route are a few dozen intervention shafts, each styled to look like a farmhouse or similar, scattered along the route in flowery meadows [space for evacuees].
I am skeptical such a thing would have generated anything like the vituperative backlash that the project experienced with its surface construction.
Would it have cost more in engineering terms? Certainly.
But I wonder what the outcome would have been, since the project wouldn't have been bogged down for years and engaged in endless redesigns, all of which sapped the political consensus that sustained it.
After all, we are somehow spending as much per kilometre or more as a base tunnel anyway.
At some point costs do seem to have become only weakly coupled to what is actually being built.
Looking at the cost comparators from other countries plenty of people build high speed rail through much more difficult terrain than the south of England and do it for much less money. HS2 doesn't have a particularly high percentage of its length in tunnels.
"More difficult terrain" in what way? The South East of England has the highest population density in Europe and you better believe that impacts design and construction choices.
er, going NW from London is through Chalk, Gault clay, greensand and lots of other sedimantary rocks. Hardly difficult terrain to tunnel. Odd bits of volcanics in the midlands biut nothing particularly hard until you get to the Lakes. So geologically there is amost nowhere easier to tunnel...
er, going NW from London is through Chalk, Gault clay, greensand and lots of other sedimantary rocks. Hardly difficult terrain to tunnel. Odd bits of volcanics in the midlands biut nothing particularly hard until you get to the Lakes. So geologically there is amost nowhere easier to tunnel...
Perhaps you just mean that the logistics of finding worksites would be challenging?
Re your second para, absolutely not. People in a densely populated environment just want accept a cheap and crappy infrastructure solution. They also have the knowledge and financial clout to tie up developments in the Courts for years.
But I wonder what the outcome would have been, since the project wouldn't have been bogged down for years and engaged in endless redesigns, all of which sapped the political consensus that sustained it.
After all, we are somehow spending as much per kilometre or more as a base tunnel anyway.
The longer a big project takes then the more likely the political-will / public-opinion is to change, mst likely for the worse.
I also remember when a major (or was it THE ?) developer on the Docklands Development project went bust it was said a project of that length (decades iirc) was bound to see bankruptcies and that the whole project was so long it was bound to go through two boom and bust cycles. Trouble is half of HS2 is no where near as useful as some but not all of the towers built in Docklands.
HS2 has (deservedly) lost all trust, both with the public and the government, so any recovery has to be a step by step process. It's going to take a long time, but the reset does provide a last chance/opportunity for high-speed rail to be revived in the UK IMO.
1) Demonstrate that HS2 Ltd can deliver according to an agreed cost/time budget
Essentially this is the work Mark Wild is doing atm and it's by far the most important step. Unless HS2 can prove it's plans/budgets are credible, it will remain un-investable for any sane government. OTOH, if it can be demonstrated over the next few years that the new budget and timeline (agreed in 2026) is being delivered and Phase 1 is on track, trust can start to be restored.
2) Re-plan Phase 2a
The pause at Handsacre offers a welcome opportunity to re-assess all works north of Birmingham. The project is very different to what was originally designed. Repeating design work is annoying, but it's much cheaper than building something which is no longer (/never was) the right answer. Other options could be considered over the next couple of years:
- A slimmed down version of 2a, possibly running at reduced speed or with other cost savings
- Build Handsacre Jn but also extend to Hixon to connect to the Stoke line (my preferred option).
- Only build HS2 to Handsacre Jn but also invest in an additional bypass or capacity improvements around Colwich
3) Change in funding/planning mindset
Alongside the work HS2 Ltd has to do to get it's house in order, the government also needs to re-think how the project is delivered. IMO we need to flip the question. Instead of creating large phases and then working out how much each one costs, the government should first decide how much it is willing to spend over an X year period on new rail infrastructure, then work out what can be delivered.
Combined with that, the delivery needs to be more modular. One of HS2's biggest flaws was how so many of the design decisions only made sense if the whole project went ahead. We need to build in more opportunities to review and adapt as we go. For example, maybe Phase 2a could be split into multiple, smaller, phases:
2033-36 - Euston
2036-38 - Handsacre Jn
2038-40 - Handsacre to Hixon
2040+ ?
Each phase is more manageable and can be delivered in a few years, rather than decades. Importantly, the next phases are only approved once HS2 shows the previous phase is on track according to agreed time/budget. The overall project will take longer, but will be better controlled and there are fewer sunk costs if things go wrong.
That is sensible, but I would get Manchester to Crewe* going as well. Possibly even before Handsacre to Hixon (or at least to complete at a similar time).
Manchester southbound buys you slots across the Stockport viaduct to improve local services, the connection to the Liverpool NPR and additional capacity at Piccadilly. Of course it is the northbound facing curve that is needed to get Scotland trains out of Castlefield, and Liverpool itself to remove 3 more from Castlefield.
That is sensible, but I would get Manchester to Crewe* going as well. Possibly even before Handsacre to Hixon (or at least to complete at a similar time).
Manchester southbound buys you slots across the Stockport viaduct to improve local services, the connection to the Liverpool NPR and additional capacity at Piccadilly. Of course it is the northbound facing curve that is needed to get Scotland trains out of Castlefield, and Liverpool itself to remove 3 more from Castlefield.
I disagree. The potential capacity problem is between Handsacre and Crewe, not north of Crewe where the line from the south forks into essentially 4 directions, none of which merit bypassing with an extremely expensive new line.
I disagree. The potential capacity problem is between Handsacre and Crewe, not north of Crewe where the line from the south forks into essentially 4 directions, none of which merit bypassing with an extremely expensive new line.
Removing 4tph from Stockport Viaduct is quite an important aim (assuming we leave one Euston - Manchester via Stoke).
Assuming this opens at the same time as Hixon then you have both Cross Country becoming Birmingham Curzon Street - Manchester, and two HS2 400m Euston trains.
In Birmingham, you gain two paths between New Street and Wolverhampton.
I assume one or two of the saved Stockport Viaduct paths go to a semi-fast Birmingham to Manchester though, that gives you much greater connectivity from places like Congleton and Stone.
In essence there is a lot to gain from fixing Manchester.
Removing 4tph from Stockport Viaduct is quite an important aim (assuming we leave one Euston - Manchester via Stoke).
Assuming this opens at the same time as Hixon then you have both Cross Country becoming Birmingham Curzon Street - Manchester, and two HS2 400m Euston trains.
In Birmingham, you gain two paths between New Street and Wolverhampton.
I assume one or two of the saved Stockport Viaduct paths go to a semi-fast Birmingham to Manchester though, that gives you much greater connectivity from places like Congleton and Stone.
In essence there is a lot to gain from fixing Manchester.
Just 2tph from Euston to Manchester would use the new line that ypu have proposed into Manchester. That isn't worth the horrendous cost of building it.
The Manchester to Birmingham setvice only merits 2tph via rhe current route and stopping pattern, but providing 8 coach electric trains rather than 4 car Voyagers would be a desirable improvement.
Just 2tph from Euston to Manchester would use the new line that ypu have proposed into Manchester. That isn't worth the horrendous cost of building it.
The Manchester to Birmingham setvice only merits 2tph via rhe current route and stopping pattern, but providing 8 coach electric trains rather than 4 car Voyagers would be a desirable improvement.
The full HS2 programme would have reduced Birmingham-Manchester by over 30 minutes to 50 minutes, driving up demand. What you are proposing might save half that if you are extremely lucky. But it wouldn’t be enough to drive the demand enough to justify the extra trains. You would still need Manchester-Birmingham-southwards XC trains.
The costs of HS2 and other UK rail projects are so ridiculous (multiples of those seen in other high cost European countries) that the amounts saved by reusing existing design work pale into insignificance compared to the value of doing it efficiently.
But we won’t be ripping up the statute and case law books so that we can concrete over great crested newts in their homes for the sake of efficiency. Has any western country done this to your satisfaction?
But I wonder what the outcome would have been, since the project wouldn't have been bogged down for years and engaged in endless redesigns, all of which sapped the political consensus that sustained it.
I agree with the planning delays point, but when the politicians have wanted something different at Euston, or less yearly spending, it is still dragged out.
I want someone to work out how much cost increase was due to inflation (ie in 2009 prices they delivered on budget), to politicians changing the plan or timeline (I faintly remember that Sunak's changes would cost more than they save), the combination of those two, or other - actual HS2 Ltd problems. I suspect we put too much blame in the wrong place.
the government should first decide how much it is willing to spend over an X year period on new rail infrastructure, then work out what can be delivered.
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