I’m not sure the problems in HS2 are as simple as gold plating, or aiming to satisfy nimbys.
The extra costs from tunnels rather than viaducts are, according to HS2 Ltd. reasonably small; if I’m reading their docs right, it’s order of hundreds of millions of pounds, which is obviously not nothing, but is pretty small in the context of the cost overruns in the project (smaller than the cost overruns in Euston alone!).
Bigger issues seem to be a combination of building much slower than was possible (because the government wanted to stay within their annual borrowing target) which meant getting hit with gigantic construction inflation, repeatedly changing the actual plans, and thus paying repeatedly for design and environmental alleviation work. I don’t think that explains it all though; I suspect a lack of consistent investment during the Cameron years plus the cuts to the civil service during that government are some of the core actual problems.
In terms of the cancellation, I think though that it was primarily a political problem - when building rail from Manchester/Leeds to London, they should have started at the Manchester/Leeds end. Firstly, the value for money assessment said that the returns from that were far higher than those from the southern leg but secondly, and probably more importantly, because British political power is *incredibly* centralised in London, and the London leg would be much less likely to be cancelled. Major transport projects in London normally get built, in part because political and civil service leaders making decisions on them use them in a way they don’t use services in the North of England (both due to car dominance in the North of England and because the senior leadership of the state simply live elsewhere).
I agree re the phasing completely. Getting the bit into London built seems politically easier.
Re. costs, I don't believe that the tunneling and huge stations didn't have a big role to play, moving slow certainly does as well but, tunneling is much slower and riskier than building above ground - and HS2 has a crazy amount of tunnel! A lot of the environmental mitigation also seems to have been excessive tunneling / below grade work.
The urban tunnels were arguably unavoidable, both in the case of London and Manchester there simply isn't room to put more railway lines in without demolishing hundreds of buildings which would have been way more expensive than building a tunnel. The geology isn't too bad for tunnelling either, it's mainly clay in London which is fairly easy to tunnel, and sandstone in Manchester which is arguably even easier. Maybe you could have saved some money putting more of the Chiltern part of the route in a cutting, but probably not huge amounts. And interestingly the Chiltern tunnel is actually one part of the project that seems on track or even ahead of schedule, the tunnels are already 80% complete. It seems counterintuitive that tunnelling would be quicker, but I guess a lot of the planning problems that plague the UK go away when you go underground.
I totally disagree, as mentioned you could go above existing ROW, but you could also use room in existing row which does exist, for example the Northolt-Acton line
I think going above existing ROW is a non-starter in this case, that would involve closing the existing lines for some period of time, which is fine if they are lightly used, but they are not, especially in Manchester you'd be cutting it off from all railway routes going south. You might be able to put some more of the Northholt-Acton part of the route above ground, but I think you still need so many parts in tunnels to avoid extensive building demolition that it's probably simpler and cheaper to just tunnel in one big stretch, especially as tunnelling under an existing ROW is relatively simple, you don't generally have too many utilities or basements in the way.
In the end I think your ideas for cost saving are good, if the network wasn't as congested as it is. We'd be able to upgrade existing approaches into London and maybe Manchester to a wider loading guage and avoid lengthy tunnels. If we'd done it decades ago when passenger numbers were lower, it could have been done that way.
I do think quite a lot of money could have been saved (but probably only at the very start) by doing a more normal 300kph top speed, instead of the 360kph design speed for HS2 and by reducing the frequency from the planned 18tph to a more normal for high speed rail 14tph. That’s very much compromising functionality, but maybe reasonably doing so.
It's a tricky one. Estimates say maybe 9-10 billion saved by a lower line speed (how much lower I don't know, but I've heard 200km/h which is not really even high speed by european standards, so I'd expect that saving to be smaller for 300km/h), which would probably mean lower frequency anyway. You'd probably have to make up for the capacity loss though, maybe double decker trains, but then you might need more platforms at stations, which is a major cost, because it would take longer to turn around the trains and there would be longer dwell times. There's no real easy answer, increasing speed is one way to increase capacity, there are alternatives but they might be more expensive.
I suppose my thinking is that 300km/h is normalish, so while the central scenario savings are probably not gigantic, the worst case scenario savings are probably pretty high. Ditto with sacrificing the capacity and dropping to 14tph; it gets you back into the range of “standard” high speed rail, which probably saves you significantly on your worst case scenario.
That said, I think they’d potentially make the southern leg dodgy on the treasury’s VFM tests. Apparently they were assuming one minute saved was worth ~600 million, which would make dropping to 300km/h ~11bn less valuable. Iirc, it was pretty touch and go for hitting the 1.5x vfm multiplier as is.
I guess the problem is all about capacity, if you don't have enough on the high speed line then you end up having to run more "classic" medium speed services on the existing network, which means you can't run as many of the regional and freight services you wanted to, which as you say might reduce the vfm.
In a wonderful example of “continually changing the plans is the problem”, I see that I (the newspaper) noticed yesterday that the Tories new policy is that design changes should be made where necessary to ensure the southern arm comes in at the lower end of the €45-54bn range.
If you keep changing the design after buying land/completion design/starting building, and you do the design changes on the back of an envelope without consulting Network Rail/HS2 Ltd., then of course the costs will end up outrageous.
I am someone who is impacted by the cancellation of Phase 2B, I live in the same city as Gareth Dennis coincidentally, I was promised by the Government that I would get HS2, Northern Powerhouse Rail and the Transpennine Route Upgrade, at present we may get the latter but half of it isn't signed off. If I wish to go to Birmingham, I have to get a crowded 4 car train for 2.5 hours. Network North is a joke, it's just the current rail network with some extra stations, it's just promise after promise that is broken. It's a joke.
HSR can be done, but it does not seem to translate into English. And remember what cancellation did to increase the cost of the NY-NJ tunnel. See the Transit Costs Project report for summary of what could be done better.
It would be interesting to get Reece and Christian Wolmar onto a podcast to debate the pro's and con's for HS2 as originally conceived.
What is really annoying is that the protected right of way acquired will be sold, a "scorched earth" policy that is likely to leave HS2 as the underexploited "Acton to Aston" line.
The decision to tunnel through the countryside was moronic. We can can argue about the overused urban tunnels forever but there is no need for long rural tunnels at all. The NIMBY and Auto Industry lobbies are also extremely powerful in the UK and have a lot more influence than in France, for example, and that's why a future Labour government will never revive the plans.
Is there a saving grace? Yes. Manchester to Birmingham was probably the least valuable part of the project. Birmingham to Leeds via Sheffield was already gone, as was Golborne and they were every bit (if not more) as important as Manchester. It is very ill-informed to suggest that Leeds-Birmingham was ever less important than Manchester, HS2 died with 2B but you wouldn't know it because of much of the news media being located in Manchester.
So what I take from this, as someone who has spent the last 10 years being a HS2 apologist in anti-railway climate is that Britain should never have tried to develop it's own HSR, as it was never realistic. Instead it should have just been contracted out to SNCF or Renfe, just HS1 was. That project was a successful HSR project in Britain. We ought to learn from it.
Very interesting take. HS1 certainly was successful in that it got built, but my understanding is that its still underutilized. There aren't that many Eurostar services and the Javelins were surprisingly infrequent as well I found!
I think the mistake with HS1 was selling it to the pension fund. Private Finance Initiatives were popular when it was built for all manner of things in Britain but it has lead to extortionate track access rights. As s result Southeastern will operate that minimum number of trains sprcificied in their franchise agreement, and with Eurostar it has been hit hard by Brexit and Channel Tunnel fees as well. The irony is that HS1 contracts out it's maintenance back to Network Rail. So I think I would suggest getting SNCF (for example) to design AND build future HSR lines in the UK but manage it as a standard P3 rather getting private Finance involved so that it can just be owned and operated by Network Rail or a successor.
I don't think the parallels between hs2 and CAHSR are that strong. The projects have high costs for different reasons. HS2 has a lot of underground segments where they should bee above ground, whereas CAHSR is almost entirely above ground, even in major cities. The only place where you could argue that CAHSR is tunneled where it shouldn't be is in downtown SF (maybe Fresno too). I think most of the cost inflation that CAHSR has had comes from onerous environmental requirements and bad construction management (starting construction before acquiring ROW and relocating utilities). On the other hand, HS2's cost increases have come from excessive measures to please NIMBYs. Certainly they have both done stuff like using electric construction equipment.
I've had some thoughts on this since the unfortunate cancellation.
Unfortunately, given how many areas HS2 touched, this is going to mess up transport/spatial planning in the UK for DECADES. It's hard to express how much money, time and political capital/effort was poured into planning around this project.
Whilst I think 'upgrading existing lines' is perhaps missing the point, HS2 demonstrates the risk of throwing everything into a single project. It is my belief that a set of much smaller projects - 50 miles of HSR here and there, station capacity upgrades, electrification, grade separation, gauging increases, would probably be the best move from here.
It's one of the reasons I strongly believe Americans are going to struggle to get better passenger rail by anything other than gradual upgrades and improvements.
I've got some thoughts of my own regarding where to go from here. The biggest is actually building underground intercity through stations for London, Manchester and Leeds.
It's a sad time to be a transport advocate in the UK, but with a political shift, hopefully we can start the ground running with some valuable lessons and some great projects to back.
Thank you for the very interestig article. A small addition: You say the "Virus" has taken over the english speaking world. I am German and can assure you it's not limited to those countries. While the German highspeed network at least slowly grows, many important projects like Hamburg - Hannover, Karlsruhe - Basel and Hannover - Bielefeld are yet to be completed or even build. Basel - Karlsruhe seems like a good example of your point: While it was originally planned to just add 2 more tracks to the existing line, NIMBYs from around the line forced the planning and construction new lines, going as far as to tunnel an entire village (Offenburg) because of noise complaints. This caused a massive increase in costs and a delay of 47 years (!).
Hamburg-Hannover on the other hand is a good concept (that doesn't feature the "at all costs" mentiality) that is constantly bombarded with Bullshit from NIMBYs. Luckily the national infrastructure company DB Netz seems to have had enough of idiotic plans (understandable gives the complications of Karlsruhe - Basel) and wants to force a proper high speed line. Now the political parties (at least in the region) are trying to sabotage the project which - again - causes massive delays. If the politicans would have just ignored that loud minority the project would likely be almost complete.
Some of the alternative projects listed already exist eg the Manchester Metro to the airport and at least one has already been cancelled. A proper HSR system would allow you to join the train In Manchester or Birmingham and go directly to the rest of Europe.
I’m not sure the problems in HS2 are as simple as gold plating, or aiming to satisfy nimbys.
The extra costs from tunnels rather than viaducts are, according to HS2 Ltd. reasonably small; if I’m reading their docs right, it’s order of hundreds of millions of pounds, which is obviously not nothing, but is pretty small in the context of the cost overruns in the project (smaller than the cost overruns in Euston alone!).
Bigger issues seem to be a combination of building much slower than was possible (because the government wanted to stay within their annual borrowing target) which meant getting hit with gigantic construction inflation, repeatedly changing the actual plans, and thus paying repeatedly for design and environmental alleviation work. I don’t think that explains it all though; I suspect a lack of consistent investment during the Cameron years plus the cuts to the civil service during that government are some of the core actual problems.
In terms of the cancellation, I think though that it was primarily a political problem - when building rail from Manchester/Leeds to London, they should have started at the Manchester/Leeds end. Firstly, the value for money assessment said that the returns from that were far higher than those from the southern leg but secondly, and probably more importantly, because British political power is *incredibly* centralised in London, and the London leg would be much less likely to be cancelled. Major transport projects in London normally get built, in part because political and civil service leaders making decisions on them use them in a way they don’t use services in the North of England (both due to car dominance in the North of England and because the senior leadership of the state simply live elsewhere).
I agree re the phasing completely. Getting the bit into London built seems politically easier.
Re. costs, I don't believe that the tunneling and huge stations didn't have a big role to play, moving slow certainly does as well but, tunneling is much slower and riskier than building above ground - and HS2 has a crazy amount of tunnel! A lot of the environmental mitigation also seems to have been excessive tunneling / below grade work.
The urban tunnels were arguably unavoidable, both in the case of London and Manchester there simply isn't room to put more railway lines in without demolishing hundreds of buildings which would have been way more expensive than building a tunnel. The geology isn't too bad for tunnelling either, it's mainly clay in London which is fairly easy to tunnel, and sandstone in Manchester which is arguably even easier. Maybe you could have saved some money putting more of the Chiltern part of the route in a cutting, but probably not huge amounts. And interestingly the Chiltern tunnel is actually one part of the project that seems on track or even ahead of schedule, the tunnels are already 80% complete. It seems counterintuitive that tunnelling would be quicker, but I guess a lot of the planning problems that plague the UK go away when you go underground.
I totally disagree, as mentioned you could go above existing ROW, but you could also use room in existing row which does exist, for example the Northolt-Acton line
I think going above existing ROW is a non-starter in this case, that would involve closing the existing lines for some period of time, which is fine if they are lightly used, but they are not, especially in Manchester you'd be cutting it off from all railway routes going south. You might be able to put some more of the Northholt-Acton part of the route above ground, but I think you still need so many parts in tunnels to avoid extensive building demolition that it's probably simpler and cheaper to just tunnel in one big stretch, especially as tunnelling under an existing ROW is relatively simple, you don't generally have too many utilities or basements in the way.
In the end I think your ideas for cost saving are good, if the network wasn't as congested as it is. We'd be able to upgrade existing approaches into London and maybe Manchester to a wider loading guage and avoid lengthy tunnels. If we'd done it decades ago when passenger numbers were lower, it could have been done that way.
I do think quite a lot of money could have been saved (but probably only at the very start) by doing a more normal 300kph top speed, instead of the 360kph design speed for HS2 and by reducing the frequency from the planned 18tph to a more normal for high speed rail 14tph. That’s very much compromising functionality, but maybe reasonably doing so.
It's a tricky one. Estimates say maybe 9-10 billion saved by a lower line speed (how much lower I don't know, but I've heard 200km/h which is not really even high speed by european standards, so I'd expect that saving to be smaller for 300km/h), which would probably mean lower frequency anyway. You'd probably have to make up for the capacity loss though, maybe double decker trains, but then you might need more platforms at stations, which is a major cost, because it would take longer to turn around the trains and there would be longer dwell times. There's no real easy answer, increasing speed is one way to increase capacity, there are alternatives but they might be more expensive.
I suppose my thinking is that 300km/h is normalish, so while the central scenario savings are probably not gigantic, the worst case scenario savings are probably pretty high. Ditto with sacrificing the capacity and dropping to 14tph; it gets you back into the range of “standard” high speed rail, which probably saves you significantly on your worst case scenario.
That said, I think they’d potentially make the southern leg dodgy on the treasury’s VFM tests. Apparently they were assuming one minute saved was worth ~600 million, which would make dropping to 300km/h ~11bn less valuable. Iirc, it was pretty touch and go for hitting the 1.5x vfm multiplier as is.
I guess the problem is all about capacity, if you don't have enough on the high speed line then you end up having to run more "classic" medium speed services on the existing network, which means you can't run as many of the regional and freight services you wanted to, which as you say might reduce the vfm.
The use of a stub end in London when you should be aiming for through running is one of those weird macro level issues
In a wonderful example of “continually changing the plans is the problem”, I see that I (the newspaper) noticed yesterday that the Tories new policy is that design changes should be made where necessary to ensure the southern arm comes in at the lower end of the €45-54bn range.
If you keep changing the design after buying land/completion design/starting building, and you do the design changes on the back of an envelope without consulting Network Rail/HS2 Ltd., then of course the costs will end up outrageous.
I am someone who is impacted by the cancellation of Phase 2B, I live in the same city as Gareth Dennis coincidentally, I was promised by the Government that I would get HS2, Northern Powerhouse Rail and the Transpennine Route Upgrade, at present we may get the latter but half of it isn't signed off. If I wish to go to Birmingham, I have to get a crowded 4 car train for 2.5 hours. Network North is a joke, it's just the current rail network with some extra stations, it's just promise after promise that is broken. It's a joke.
Hopefully the new capacity / speed into London can provide some material improvement, but I agree - its a crappy time.
HSR can be done, but it does not seem to translate into English. And remember what cancellation did to increase the cost of the NY-NJ tunnel. See the Transit Costs Project report for summary of what could be done better.
For sure, they were planning on covering HSR and I hope this spurs them to!
It would be interesting to get Reece and Christian Wolmar onto a podcast to debate the pro's and con's for HS2 as originally conceived.
What is really annoying is that the protected right of way acquired will be sold, a "scorched earth" policy that is likely to leave HS2 as the underexploited "Acton to Aston" line.
The decision to tunnel through the countryside was moronic. We can can argue about the overused urban tunnels forever but there is no need for long rural tunnels at all. The NIMBY and Auto Industry lobbies are also extremely powerful in the UK and have a lot more influence than in France, for example, and that's why a future Labour government will never revive the plans.
Is there a saving grace? Yes. Manchester to Birmingham was probably the least valuable part of the project. Birmingham to Leeds via Sheffield was already gone, as was Golborne and they were every bit (if not more) as important as Manchester. It is very ill-informed to suggest that Leeds-Birmingham was ever less important than Manchester, HS2 died with 2B but you wouldn't know it because of much of the news media being located in Manchester.
So what I take from this, as someone who has spent the last 10 years being a HS2 apologist in anti-railway climate is that Britain should never have tried to develop it's own HSR, as it was never realistic. Instead it should have just been contracted out to SNCF or Renfe, just HS1 was. That project was a successful HSR project in Britain. We ought to learn from it.
Very interesting take. HS1 certainly was successful in that it got built, but my understanding is that its still underutilized. There aren't that many Eurostar services and the Javelins were surprisingly infrequent as well I found!
I think the mistake with HS1 was selling it to the pension fund. Private Finance Initiatives were popular when it was built for all manner of things in Britain but it has lead to extortionate track access rights. As s result Southeastern will operate that minimum number of trains sprcificied in their franchise agreement, and with Eurostar it has been hit hard by Brexit and Channel Tunnel fees as well. The irony is that HS1 contracts out it's maintenance back to Network Rail. So I think I would suggest getting SNCF (for example) to design AND build future HSR lines in the UK but manage it as a standard P3 rather getting private Finance involved so that it can just be owned and operated by Network Rail or a successor.
I don't think the parallels between hs2 and CAHSR are that strong. The projects have high costs for different reasons. HS2 has a lot of underground segments where they should bee above ground, whereas CAHSR is almost entirely above ground, even in major cities. The only place where you could argue that CAHSR is tunneled where it shouldn't be is in downtown SF (maybe Fresno too). I think most of the cost inflation that CAHSR has had comes from onerous environmental requirements and bad construction management (starting construction before acquiring ROW and relocating utilities). On the other hand, HS2's cost increases have come from excessive measures to please NIMBYs. Certainly they have both done stuff like using electric construction equipment.
Ontario Line comparisons are apt, and unfortunately, not just not he NIMBY front.
https://mstdn.social/@RM_Transit/111201287471133578
The “warning” should be to carefully consider it costs will exceed benefits, BEFORE making commitments.
I've had some thoughts on this since the unfortunate cancellation.
Unfortunately, given how many areas HS2 touched, this is going to mess up transport/spatial planning in the UK for DECADES. It's hard to express how much money, time and political capital/effort was poured into planning around this project.
Whilst I think 'upgrading existing lines' is perhaps missing the point, HS2 demonstrates the risk of throwing everything into a single project. It is my belief that a set of much smaller projects - 50 miles of HSR here and there, station capacity upgrades, electrification, grade separation, gauging increases, would probably be the best move from here.
It's one of the reasons I strongly believe Americans are going to struggle to get better passenger rail by anything other than gradual upgrades and improvements.
I've got some thoughts of my own regarding where to go from here. The biggest is actually building underground intercity through stations for London, Manchester and Leeds.
It's a sad time to be a transport advocate in the UK, but with a political shift, hopefully we can start the ground running with some valuable lessons and some great projects to back.
Thank you for the very interestig article. A small addition: You say the "Virus" has taken over the english speaking world. I am German and can assure you it's not limited to those countries. While the German highspeed network at least slowly grows, many important projects like Hamburg - Hannover, Karlsruhe - Basel and Hannover - Bielefeld are yet to be completed or even build. Basel - Karlsruhe seems like a good example of your point: While it was originally planned to just add 2 more tracks to the existing line, NIMBYs from around the line forced the planning and construction new lines, going as far as to tunnel an entire village (Offenburg) because of noise complaints. This caused a massive increase in costs and a delay of 47 years (!).
Hamburg-Hannover on the other hand is a good concept (that doesn't feature the "at all costs" mentiality) that is constantly bombarded with Bullshit from NIMBYs. Luckily the national infrastructure company DB Netz seems to have had enough of idiotic plans (understandable gives the complications of Karlsruhe - Basel) and wants to force a proper high speed line. Now the political parties (at least in the region) are trying to sabotage the project which - again - causes massive delays. If the politicans would have just ignored that loud minority the project would likely be almost complete.
Some of the alternative projects listed already exist eg the Manchester Metro to the airport and at least one has already been cancelled. A proper HSR system would allow you to join the train In Manchester or Birmingham and go directly to the rest of Europe.