Why Britain's High Speed Railway hit the gold-plated buffers…
"I am cancelling the rest of the HS2 project and in its place, we will reinvest every single penny, £36 billion in hundreds of new transport projects in the north and the midlands, across the country." - Rishi Sunak
Revealingly, the British Prime Minster chose to announce his squealing handbrake turn of a transport policy shift at this month's Conservative Party conference. Public policy is supposed to be announced to the UK Parliament and carefully debated, not tailored to produce tabloid headlines. Not that Sunak's announcement was in any way unexpected. It simply confirmed what everyone in the transport industry had long suspected, which was that the government was abandoning its plans for a high-speed rail link between London and the north of England.
The aim originally was for bullet trains to speed through the English countryside at 360 kilometers per hour or 225 British miles per hour all the way from London's Euston station up to Birmingham, before dividing and heading further north to Manchester, Leeds and beyond.
In 2020, a review commissioned by the government recommitted to the full "Y-fronts" design, with its two northern legs, saying only this made economic sense.
Building the route has been a flagship project of the Conservatives. The line had a political function, reconnecting the north of England, that votes Labour, to the south, which votes Tory. At one time, both parties thought it served their interests.
The line matters because England is a country of two halves. There's a south-eastern part, with London dominating, which is affluent and successful. This is home to most of the population, along with the UK parliament and England's key industry - which is finance.
But there's another England, north of Watford, which is increasingly restive. It's heartland is the old industrial cities, places like Birmingham, Manchester and Leeds.
The whole point of the new rail line was to link these two Englands back together again - to make it quicker and easier to move people - and freight - from one part to the other. In an age when 88% of trips in the UK are by road, there is little justification for the line other than as a way of reconnecting an increasingly divided nation.
That's an ambitious political aim and 'HS2' as it is known, abbreviation of High Speed route, second phase, was ambitious in scale - the largest infrastructure project in Europe.
Largest? How can that be when France has 2,800 km of high-speed rail lines and Spain 3,762 km ? Britain's HS2 line is … 225 kilometers long?
No, this is the largest project, measured in terms of cost. Here, Britain really does beat the world.
HS2 costs around £250 million per kilometer. By comparison, a recent assessment of 20 European high speed railway networks found costs nearly £32 million per kilometer. A European Court of Auditors report from 2018 put the average cost even lower at £25 million per kilometer. HS2 comes in at eight times as much as the Tours-Bordeaux high-speed line that entered service in 2017. That's quite a difference.
When it was first given the go-ahead by the government in 2012, the whole network was supposed to cost £33 billion, including the north-eastern leg going to Leeds. But then we were told to forget Leeds and now the eastern leg to Manchester too and yet even to reach the Midlands, the 2023 cost is about £100 billion. And that's before you buy any trains!
Indeed, at £400 million per English mile, HS2 is the world's most expensive railway. And although, yes, England is a crowded island, even when HS2 runs through agricultural land, at £165 million per mile, it still costs double the price Italy recently paid to build a high speed connection between Naples and Bari.
And talking about how expensive it is to put a railway through built-up areas, at the London end, a final decision has not been reached about whether to start from Euston (which of course is far more useful, or to settle for the obscure if charmingly named suburb of Old Oak Common, six miles to the west - which is cheaper. Looking at this money-saving plan, the Guardian's financial editor Nils Pratley said it "piled absurdity upon absurdity".
Something absurd was there too in the revelation that, pending a decision, two multi-million pound tunnel boring machines would be BURIED at Old Oak Common.
Absurd, but the government balked at the estimates for upgrading Euston which escalated from £2.6 billion to nearly £5 billion with the increase due to "botched decisions", to use the phrase in an official National Audit Office report. By comparison, the UK's annual budget for ALL its projects relating to walking, running and cycling is about £3 billion.
Some decisions were expensive but more defensible - like running the trains on concrete blocks rather than standard ballast. This improved reliability and reduced maintenance costs. However, the huge salaries paid to staff, from the CEO's £750k a year down the hierarchy, seem to reflect a "money no object" culture.
A reason offered to justify HS2's cost is the amount of tunnelling involved, yet in Japan, bullet trains travel on a new line (the Hokkaido line) built at £30m per kilometer despite almost half of the line being tunnelled.
No, forget tunnels. Because it's not just train lines that the British struggle to build. The campaign group 'Britain Remade' has looked at 21 tram projects in Britain and France. They found that these were two and a half times more expensive than the French ones on a distance basis. This explains why Leeds saw its long-cherished dream of a 'Supertram' cancelled in 2005 after construction costs doubled to £1 billion (£1.6 billion in today's prices) and why, when Manchester looked at a second tram crossing for the city, the price tag ended up at £250 million per mile! France's Besançon tramway, by comparison, cost barely one tenth as much! And it was completed six months ahead of schedule too.
At least the Brits managed to complete a new tube line - the Elizabeth line, or "Crossrail" - last year. Only months after opening, it has become the busiest railway in Britain. Yet at a cost of £16 billion (£18 billion in 2023 prices) for just the central tunnelled section it is one of the world's most expensive metro systems.
By comparison, between 2004 and 2007, commuters in the Madrid region gained an additional EIGHTY new metro and light-rail stations, at a bargain basement cost of £5 billion.
It might seem that the British haven't learnt much since September 27, 1825, when the 8 mile (13km) Stockton & Darlington Railway became the first railway in the world. The world's first train engine ran the length preceded by a protester on horseback carrying a flag reading Periculum privatum utilitas publica ("The private danger is the public good").
The cost to build it has been estimated at £115 000 which in today's money would be roughly one million pounds a mile. At the time, this was a huge amount - but the entrepreneur behind it, George Stephenson, dispelled doubts by explaining that a single steam engine on iron rails could pull fifty times the load that horses could draw.
Spectators were convinced when, with the protest out of the way, Stephenson opened the throttle and pulled his train of wagons carrying 450 persons at a speed of 15 miles (24 kilometers) per hour. It was an incredible achievement. Today, alas, what is incredible in England is that not terribly different railway lines cost two hundred times as much to lay. Or in HS2's case, one thousand four hundred times as much.
When France's 'Aerotrain' fell to earth
When France's 'Aerotrain' fell to earth
HS2 was a very ambitious rail project, indeed. Speaking of which, so too was that of a French engineer called Jean Bertin in the 1960s. Bertin dreamt of a very fast and very futuristic monorail, which he dubbed 'Aerotrain'. He tested his flagship train on a disused railway outside Paris before moving to Orléans, in the Loire region, where an 18 kilometer long elevated test track was built. The train could travel at up to 400 kilometers per hour! A world record at the time. Bertin, was sure that his invention was the future of rail travel, yet, the French government decided to withdraw funding from the project, as they preferred to support the making of the SNCF's now famous TGV…
In 2017, a new startup called 'Spacetrain' said they were going to reinvent the Aerotrain and run them from Orléans to Paris (including along the old test track) as well as later to build another line from Paris to Le Havre in Normandy. The trains were set to travel at speeds going up to 540 kilometers per hour! But in 2020, financial problems escalated and employees were not being paid. Finally in January this year, the court in Orléans sentenced Spacetrain's founders to prison. It seems that their dream of Aerotrains running from Orléans to Paris and beyond is probably gone forever.
In 2017, a new startup called 'Spacetrain' said they were going to reinvent the Aerotrain and run them from Orléans to Paris (including along the old test track) as well as later to build another line from Paris to Le Havre in Normandy. The trains were set to travel at speeds going up to 540 kilometers per hour! But in 2020, financial problems escalated and employees were not being paid. Finally in January this year, the court in Orléans sentenced Spacetrain's founders to prison. It seems that their dream of Aerotrains running from Orléans to Paris and beyond is probably gone forever.
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