What can you get for £45bn?

[Palmerston]

The recent NPR announcement said funds of up to £45bn are available. What do you get for this? I'm not an expert but the big costs I can see are:

Liverpool to Manchester line, plus lots of work Manchester Airport and Piccadilly. Was £17bn once suggested for this?
Electrification work on various lines. Could I assume £11bn i.e. the same as the TRU upgrade?
New Bradford station - £1-2bn? Bit of a guess here.
Leamside line reopening - £1-2bn? Bit of a guess here.
Rotherham and any other stations - £1bn?

That's only got me to £31-33bn. These numbers may be obviously wrong, but if anyone wanted to point out what I've missed or make some more educated suggestions, I'd be interested to see. Appreciate you can spend a lot pretty quickly based on HS2.

 

[Farigiraf]

45 feasibility studies?

 

[brad465]

HS2 from London-Birmingham that's 100% in tunnel, with a bit leftover. The Mont d'Ambin Base tunnel has a construction cost of 8bn euros and is just over 35 miles long, so four of those in a row would be 32bn euros, about £27bn, leaving 18bn to extend the tunnel further north.

(In reality I expect there's more than meets the eye, this is a case study of highlighting how stupid our construction costs and process are).

 

[The Pelican]

15,000 Great Western Railway's including London and Bristol terminus stations at Brunel's estimated cost.

7,500 Great Western Railways at the eventual cost.

Multiplying 118*15,000 that would be 1,770,000 miles of track- substantially more than the 812,500 miles Wikipedia suggests the world acually posesses!

 

[WTT Gremlin]

15,000 Great Western Railway's including London and Bristol terminus stations at Brunel's estimated cost.

7,500 Great Western Railways at the eventual cost.

Multiplying 118*15,000 that would be 1,770,000 miles of track- substantially more than the 812,500 miles Wikipedia suggests the world acually posesses!

And what about the costs of returning to the gold standard... we can leave all of the devaluation (including inflation) off for the moment...

== Doublepost prevention - post automatically merged: 17 Jan 2026 ==

The recent NPR announcement said funds of up to £45bn are available. What do you get for this? I'm not an expert but the big costs I can see are:

Liverpool to Manchester line, plus lots of work Manchester Airport and Piccadilly. Was £17bn once suggested for this?
Electrification work on various lines. Could I assume £11bn i.e. the same as the TRU upgrade?
New Bradford station - £1-2bn? Bit of a guess here.
Leamside line reopening - £1-2bn? Bit of a guess here.
Rotherham and any other stations - £1bn?

That's only got me to £31-33bn. These numbers may be obviously wrong, but if anyone wanted to point out what I've missed or make some more educated suggestions, I'd be interested to see. Appreciate you can spend a lot pretty quickly based on HS2.

Given that the last 5 years have done nothing but significantly increase costs, any old figures would want revising northward. The overall cost of Leamside would depend on the spec it is rebuilt to... and just how much (or should it be little) existing infrastructure aids building the route.