The original plan was to have 18 trains running every hour in each direction between London and Birmingham [0]. This is tube frequency, and very difficult to do. Therefore the specs and designs were quite expensive. But however sophisticated (or not) the trains where, a _lot_ of money is needed to buy out property holders and construction.
However, this is a complete paradigm shift in the way of travel. This would have made Birmingham a suburb of London, as you can just go to the train station and hop on the next train as you do if you were to travel from anywhere within London.
The newspapers kept reporting the "faster" travel times which only shaves off "a few minutes" for a huge amount of money. But that was not the point. The point was capacity through frequency.
Over the years, this has been watered down. Now still a huge amount of money is spent on property buyouts and nature preservation / protection (the same higher frequency trains would have needed as well), on a marginally better service.
It seems to me (maybe thats wrong) that a lot of the fancy tech that is needed for increasing frequency could be had at relatively low extra cost, because there is this high base budget that needs to be spent whatever the performance of this new rail-line. So now HS2 is the worst of both worlds: expensive works delivering only a small improvement.
Mm, the point was increasing capacity on the WCML, for which there is large demand right now
What's murkier is what capacity is needed 50+ years from now on the new line. It was never going to be full day 1, but you don't build new expensive things hoping to run them at 100% capacity from the very start. Passenger growth was (pre-covid) only going up, so a design that could cope with passenger flows for the next 50 years was inevitable.
18 per hour, that's one train every 3 minutes or so? Doesn't that seem overly excessive? Every 10 mins is probably more than enough, just make trains slightly longer to accommodate capacity and the logistics would be easier.
I was looking at London-Plymouth trains a few months back and the timetable was like once every 2 hours and the last one was at around 5 PM. I think going to maybe once an hour and more than like 3 trains per day would be a decent first improvement before trying something this ludicrous lol. Perfect is the enemy of good.
>This would have made Birmingham a suburb of London, as you can just go to the train station and hop on the next train
At the moment you can just pop to Euston and jump on a train, a few per hour, taking 1hr18m. The problem for most people though is, were I to do so now, a single is £94 which is quite steep for most people. In actual london suburbs you can hop on a train which takes like 20-60 mins and the big difference is the fare is more like £5.
If the designers were building what the customers want I think they'd go for something cheaper. The design seems to suffer from it being government money so it's free so what's another £50bn?
The £100m bat cover is quite impressive https://archive.ph/HLQD0 They reasoned there are bats nearby and they might fly into the trains, I guess bats not being very good at hearing things coming, and so better build a roof over the tracks if any may be around.
Mismanagement aside, HS2 required 8000+ different permits along its route [1], as well as years of opposition and legal battles from environmental groups and NIMBYs.
This is a significant portion of the cost, huge amounts of 'green tunnels' and cuttings are being created where they are not needed.
I suspect over-engineering and being allowed to generally spunk money up the wall was the main culprit.
The £100m bat shed isn't a sign to me of over-zealous environmentalists, it's a sign that the project was mismanaged because there wasn't enough pushback on spunking £100m up the wall with a mindset of "oh well, it's a big project, I guess £100m isn't much in the scheme of a project in the tens-of-billions things!.
This is what I find really bizarre, huge sums spent on hypothetical risks based on pure conjecture, e.g. the bat shed, with apparently not even any compelling evidence presented for such risks.
I'm afraid it is not as simple as that, and there is a lot of misinformation about HS2 that should be addressed.
Firstly, the 'bat shed' (officially SWBMS) is expected to cost £100m. This is neither expensive nor wasteful for a structure nearly 1 kilometre long and "designed to accommodate up to 36 high-speed trains passing through the structure every hour of operation for 120 years, plus frequent conventional rail traffic in addition" as reported by Architects' Journal[1].
One should also refer to Natural England's own press release on the subject[2]. The first paragraph is worth quoting verbatim: "Natural England has not required HS2 Ltd to build the reported structure, or any other structure, nor advised on the design or costs. The need for the structure was identified by HS2 Ltd more than 10 years ago, following extensive surveying of bat populations by its own ecologists in the vicinity of Sheephouse Wood." It is absurd to think that Natural England would want to build a kilometre-long structure beside a forest if they didn't think it was of net benefit to the environment, yet that is the spin that most newspapers are putting on it.
Additionally, Louise Haigh is, as far as I can tell, a genuinely pro-rail minister. She is for instance the only cabinet member to have filed any significant MP's expenses for rail travel. However, it should also be remembered that the current Labour government's publicity strategy has consistently been to depict all projects started by the previous Tory governments as wasteful or corrupt; thus, we should take any of her communications with a pinch of salt.
I am very excited about HS2, which is being built to standard European loading gauges and will allow for high-capacity double-decker train services. Yet this does not have to be at the expense of local ecology, and these cuttings and tunnels are necessary to support both goals.
I think this article recycles a lot of the arguments that have happened over this and as usual doesn't make the correct case for why it's being done.
[NB to get passenger services off other lines because they dramatically reduce freight capacity]
As for the costs...well, some people in the UK don't want power lines, don't want wind turbines, don't want nuclear power plants, don't want anything in fact except the freedom to continue living their comfortable ruralish lives while the rest of us starve and die out and preferably just go away. They do, however, want Waitrose and possibly Sainsburys to keep on functioning and possibly their electric lights.
If there's a price to be paid - they're not going to pay any of it. So everything is a battle, and it's not an autocracy so a government that wants to be elected again has to think twice before taking on enemies.
On the other hand there's a big part of the UK that doesn't want to work or support itself and does want to confiscate other peoples money in order to continue to sit in social housing with social wellfare and a plethora of other social services.
I understand all those against HS2 due to various reasons (costs, environment etc), but what is the alternative? If the current tracks are at capacity there is no easy solution. If they stop the project now, surely, that's all the money spent so far down the drain?
I heard someone say that they wished it had been called High Capacity 2, rather than High Speed 2.
What we need is more rail capacity, while people opposed to this project latched onto the idea that no one really wanted to get from London to Birmingham (a somewhat unlovely city that is the first major stop on the line) faster.
And of course, just to top off the fucking insanity here, the UK has a system of governance where a simple HoC majority can say "yeah, we're building it, lolsoz we'll pay for your house and sorry about the bats" and all the red tape would literally disappear. This isn't America where people can bang on about the constitution or some shit. The Tories didn't want to piss off the voters, but Labour are simply lacking the cojones here.
At this point wouldn't it be cheaper to just move the capital to somewhere in the Midlands, and in so doing hitting two birds with one stone? I.e. decongesting London and giving (back) lots of economic opportunities to Midlands itself (which seems like it got the shortest of sticks as a result of Britain's des-industrialisation) and even to Northern England. And I'm not just talking about moving some BBC offices and stuff like that, I'm talking about moving the whole damn thing, i.e. the Government and even the Parliament.
Otherwise the entire island of Britain (or the English part of it, at least) would be geared towards its South-Eastern corner only, and there's only so much that you can alleviate that by infrastructure works.
The Parliament building is literally falling down, so at least temporarily moving out to somewhere while they rebuild it has been proposed a few times. Probably it would take it actually burning down for MPs to leave.
If you are building a railway through very expensive real estate, it's going to be expensive. The California High Speed Rail project is having the same issues. Buying up property in Los Angeles and San Francisco is super expensive.
The bits that have really cost have been going through the Cotswolds where local opposition has meant insane planning applications and eventually a decision to bury the lines in tunnels. It was totally unnecessary and could have gone above ground if we had a more sane planning system, something the new government has promised to at least try and change (I suspect they will fail…)
Given the high amount of human trafficking that is involved in practically all construction of infrastructure, it is kind of strange how expensive it really is. It seems less and less of the budget is spent on actually construction.
By the west I presume you mean US+Canada+UK. Maybe you're including Australia and New Zealand?
France, Germany, Spain, Italy, Sweden, Denmark, Norway, etc. do it just fine. They have good various combinations of urban and interurban public transit which was expanded in the past 10-20 years. (be it high speed rail or new subway lines or big bridges).
The UK did just fine with HS1 - built under budget - and the Elizabeth Line, which was over and late but has been a huge commercial and popular success.
HS2 is just a bad answer to the problems its trying to address.
Perspective: China is suffering terribly from the out of control debt used to build their high speed rail system and incidents are being systematically covered up rather than used to improve reliability of service. It's a trillion dollar blow out, not the great success that so many claim it to be.
I live close to the line so drive past most days. They have been building a bridge over where the track will run (no track at all yet) for 5 years. Oh and the bridge a little further up they built in wrong place so had to remove it and start again. So yeah this is the level of speed and quality we will see.
Most of the money isn't being spent on building a railway, it's being spent on not building it, such as by redesigning Euston station to be smaller and more expensive, repeatedly, and making sure to spend a large amount of money demolishing buildings and digging a big hole in the ground before cancelling it.
Make no mistake, this was deliberate Conservative policy. They knew (as everyone else did) that they were going to lose the last election, years before the fact, and chose to set money on fire and sabotage the country's infrastructure in order to make life harder for the Labour government that was coming and ensure they couldn't get a win.
There's a UK politics tradition called "kicking it into the long grass"
You've got a group of stakeholders who passionately believe X should be done. They've got some strong arguments, and some political backing. You've got another group of stakeholders who strongly think X should not be done. They've got some good arguments, and some powerful supporters.
So how do you resolve the debate? Which of the two groups are you going to upset? It's simple! You just delay the decision. Order a study, set up a committee, change the requirements, whatever. Just hold up any major works for 5 years or so without cancelling the project, and you can leave office making it some other chump's problem.
Nuclear power plant we might need, but it's expensive and nuclear? Long grass. Extra runway at a busy airport, but locals don't like it? Long grass. Decarbonising transport, but it'll raise prices? Long grass. Nuclear weapons renewal? Long grass. Incredibly busy road through a world heritage site? Long grass.
Sorry but for some ballance, the current prime minister stood in parliament and opposed the entire HS2 project "on cost and merit" and voted against the project in 2016. He said "the only sensible plan is to abandon the project altogether".
> They knew (as everyone else did) that they were going to lose the last election, years before the fact, and chose to set money on fire and sabotage the country's infrastructure in order to make life harder for the Labour government that was coming and ensure they couldn't get a win.
Actually HS2 was never popular in Conservative constituencies and if they had a manifesto pledge to scrap the project entirely, they might've stood a chance.
What they needed was another line to relieve congestion on the WCML. But it needn't have been High Speed Rail. HSR is too expensive and impractical. Regular Rail was sufficient. The French call their HSR "debt on wheels".
Regular rail is ruinously expensive in this country too, East West Rail, which is an unelectrified <100mph railway, is probably going to end up costing in the region of £10bn and take twenty years to build.
Even local tram projects with distances in the single digits can cost hundreds of millions of pounds now, it's ludicrous.
[+] [-] prennert|1 year ago|reply
However, this is a complete paradigm shift in the way of travel. This would have made Birmingham a suburb of London, as you can just go to the train station and hop on the next train as you do if you were to travel from anywhere within London.
The newspapers kept reporting the "faster" travel times which only shaves off "a few minutes" for a huge amount of money. But that was not the point. The point was capacity through frequency.
Over the years, this has been watered down. Now still a huge amount of money is spent on property buyouts and nature preservation / protection (the same higher frequency trains would have needed as well), on a marginally better service.
It seems to me (maybe thats wrong) that a lot of the fancy tech that is needed for increasing frequency could be had at relatively low extra cost, because there is this high base budget that needs to be spent whatever the performance of this new rail-line. So now HS2 is the worst of both worlds: expensive works delivering only a small improvement.
[0]: https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/5a82b56740f0b...
[+] [-] growse|1 year ago|reply
Mm, the point was increasing capacity on the WCML, for which there is large demand right now
What's murkier is what capacity is needed 50+ years from now on the new line. It was never going to be full day 1, but you don't build new expensive things hoping to run them at 100% capacity from the very start. Passenger growth was (pre-covid) only going up, so a design that could cope with passenger flows for the next 50 years was inevitable.
[+] [-] t43562|1 year ago|reply
The HS2 line itself is a kind of side benefit in a sense.
[+] [-] m4rtink|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] moffkalast|1 year ago|reply
I was looking at London-Plymouth trains a few months back and the timetable was like once every 2 hours and the last one was at around 5 PM. I think going to maybe once an hour and more than like 3 trains per day would be a decent first improvement before trying something this ludicrous lol. Perfect is the enemy of good.
[+] [-] tim333|1 year ago|reply
At the moment you can just pop to Euston and jump on a train, a few per hour, taking 1hr18m. The problem for most people though is, were I to do so now, a single is £94 which is quite steep for most people. In actual london suburbs you can hop on a train which takes like 20-60 mins and the big difference is the fare is more like £5.
If the designers were building what the customers want I think they'd go for something cheaper. The design seems to suffer from it being government money so it's free so what's another £50bn?
The £100m bat cover is quite impressive https://archive.ph/HLQD0 They reasoned there are bats nearby and they might fly into the trains, I guess bats not being very good at hearing things coming, and so better build a roof over the tracks if any may be around.
[+] [-] pllu|1 year ago|reply
"Three trains per hour from London to each of Birmingham, Manchester and Leeds"
It says "Up to 18 trains per hour would run in each direction between London and the UK’s major cities" but that's from London to several cities.
https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/5a82b56740f0b...
[+] [-] Dennip|1 year ago|reply
This is a significant portion of the cost, huge amounts of 'green tunnels' and cuttings are being created where they are not needed.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2024/nov/07/cost-of-shed...
[+] [-] Closi|1 year ago|reply
The £100m bat shed isn't a sign to me of over-zealous environmentalists, it's a sign that the project was mismanaged because there wasn't enough pushback on spunking £100m up the wall with a mindset of "oh well, it's a big project, I guess £100m isn't much in the scheme of a project in the tens-of-billions things!.
[+] [-] MichaelZuo|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] seabass-labrax|1 year ago|reply
Firstly, the 'bat shed' (officially SWBMS) is expected to cost £100m. This is neither expensive nor wasteful for a structure nearly 1 kilometre long and "designed to accommodate up to 36 high-speed trains passing through the structure every hour of operation for 120 years, plus frequent conventional rail traffic in addition" as reported by Architects' Journal[1].
One should also refer to Natural England's own press release on the subject[2]. The first paragraph is worth quoting verbatim: "Natural England has not required HS2 Ltd to build the reported structure, or any other structure, nor advised on the design or costs. The need for the structure was identified by HS2 Ltd more than 10 years ago, following extensive surveying of bat populations by its own ecologists in the vicinity of Sheephouse Wood." It is absurd to think that Natural England would want to build a kilometre-long structure beside a forest if they didn't think it was of net benefit to the environment, yet that is the spin that most newspapers are putting on it.
Additionally, Louise Haigh is, as far as I can tell, a genuinely pro-rail minister. She is for instance the only cabinet member to have filed any significant MP's expenses for rail travel. However, it should also be remembered that the current Labour government's publicity strategy has consistently been to depict all projects started by the previous Tory governments as wasteful or corrupt; thus, we should take any of her communications with a pinch of salt.
I am very excited about HS2, which is being built to standard European loading gauges and will allow for high-capacity double-decker train services. Yet this does not have to be at the expense of local ecology, and these cuttings and tunnels are necessary to support both goals.
[1]: https://www.architectsjournal.co.uk/news/transport-secretary...
[2]: https://naturalengland.blog.gov.uk/2024/11/08/natural-englan...
[+] [-] tacker2000|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] tharmas|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] t43562|1 year ago|reply
[NB to get passenger services off other lines because they dramatically reduce freight capacity]
As for the costs...well, some people in the UK don't want power lines, don't want wind turbines, don't want nuclear power plants, don't want anything in fact except the freedom to continue living their comfortable ruralish lives while the rest of us starve and die out and preferably just go away. They do, however, want Waitrose and possibly Sainsburys to keep on functioning and possibly their electric lights.
If there's a price to be paid - they're not going to pay any of it. So everything is a battle, and it's not an autocracy so a government that wants to be elected again has to think twice before taking on enemies.
[+] [-] sgt101|1 year ago|reply
We can have a libertarian country.
Or we can have a social democratic one.
We can't have both.
[+] [-] haspok|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] mprev|1 year ago|reply
What we need is more rail capacity, while people opposed to this project latched onto the idea that no one really wanted to get from London to Birmingham (a somewhat unlovely city that is the first major stop on the line) faster.
[+] [-] HPsquared|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] fifilura|1 year ago|reply
Isn't the problem the price-tag?
[+] [-] tharmas|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] petesergeant|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] paganel|1 year ago|reply
Otherwise the entire island of Britain (or the English part of it, at least) would be geared towards its South-Eastern corner only, and there's only so much that you can alleviate that by infrastructure works.
[+] [-] roywiggins|1 year ago|reply
https://committees.parliament.uk/committee/127/public-accoun...
[+] [-] vondur|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] physicsguy|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] looofooo0|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] belorn|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] sofixa|1 year ago|reply
France, Germany, Spain, Italy, Sweden, Denmark, Norway, etc. do it just fine. They have good various combinations of urban and interurban public transit which was expanded in the past 10-20 years. (be it high speed rail or new subway lines or big bridges).
[+] [-] TheOtherHobbes|1 year ago|reply
HS2 is just a bad answer to the problems its trying to address.
[+] [-] HPsquared|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] rado|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] m0llusk|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] netsharc|1 year ago|reply
2.6% of 45000 is 1170.
[+] [-] masfuerte|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] whalesalad|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] muteor|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] lmm|1 year ago|reply
Make no mistake, this was deliberate Conservative policy. They knew (as everyone else did) that they were going to lose the last election, years before the fact, and chose to set money on fire and sabotage the country's infrastructure in order to make life harder for the Labour government that was coming and ensure they couldn't get a win.
[+] [-] michaelt|1 year ago|reply
You've got a group of stakeholders who passionately believe X should be done. They've got some strong arguments, and some political backing. You've got another group of stakeholders who strongly think X should not be done. They've got some good arguments, and some powerful supporters.
So how do you resolve the debate? Which of the two groups are you going to upset? It's simple! You just delay the decision. Order a study, set up a committee, change the requirements, whatever. Just hold up any major works for 5 years or so without cancelling the project, and you can leave office making it some other chump's problem.
Nuclear power plant we might need, but it's expensive and nuclear? Long grass. Extra runway at a busy airport, but locals don't like it? Long grass. Decarbonising transport, but it'll raise prices? Long grass. Nuclear weapons renewal? Long grass. Incredibly busy road through a world heritage site? Long grass.
[+] [-] krona|1 year ago|reply
> They knew (as everyone else did) that they were going to lose the last election, years before the fact, and chose to set money on fire and sabotage the country's infrastructure in order to make life harder for the Labour government that was coming and ensure they couldn't get a win.
Actually HS2 was never popular in Conservative constituencies and if they had a manifesto pledge to scrap the project entirely, they might've stood a chance.
[+] [-] unknown|1 year ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] surfingdino|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] gadders|1 year ago|reply
https://www.kentonline.co.uk/gravesend/news/lower-thames-cro...
[+] [-] Oarch|1 year ago|reply
They're not even sure it'll help the bats...
[+] [-] sgt101|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] simplecto|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] swarnie|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] tharmas|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] MLR|1 year ago|reply
Even local tram projects with distances in the single digits can cost hundreds of millions of pounds now, it's ludicrous.