I’ve long documented the failures of California’s still unbuilt high speed rail, and now a video from Simon Whistler (yeah, him) covers a similar doomed British high speed rail project:
“Even in a country used to paying absurd prices for everything from houses to a pint of beer, it was still a pretty eye-watering figure. After initially being projected to cost under £40 billion in 2012, Britain’s second high-speed rail project, HS2, was recently calculated to be facing a price tag closer to £100 billion.”
“Just the first phase alone the 34 miles connecting London and Birmingham is in danger of becoming one of the most expensive railways ever built.”
It was originally supposed to pay for itself by offering high speed connections between London and three English industrial cities in the north: Manchester, Leeds and Sheffield. But ballooning costs forced the cancellation of those two line extensions.
“All rationale for HS2 vanished, leaving the UK with a multi-billion pound bill just to slightly reduce travel time between London and Birmingham.”
HS1 was the 62 mile high speed rail line from London to the channel tunnel. It only cost three times the estimated price.
One reason it was considered a success: “It had added significant extra capacity to commuter lines running into London from Kent, as much as 40% extra in peak times.”
In the dying days Gordon Brown’s Labor government in 2010, Transport Secretary and rail freak Lord Adonis published a white paper outlining his Utopian high speed rail vision for Britain. Unfortunately, incoming conservative George Osborne had a soft spot for flashy infrastructure projects.
“Neither Adonis nor Osborne nor anybody else could have envisaged a budget that would soon balloon wildly out of control.” Actually, I suspect anyone familiar with the many failures of high speed rail projects in the U.S. could indeed have envisaged it.
By 2015 it was up to £55 billion.
By 2019 it was £71 billion, or over £22,000 for every UK household.
After 2020 and Flu Manchu, it was over £100 billion, and PM Rishi Sunak pulled the plug on everything but the London to Birmingham stretch, which was still going to cost £53 billion, or £396 million per mile.
“The fast train from Euston Station to Birmingham New Street takes around 1 hour and 40 minutes. All H2 will do will shave 25 to 35 minutes off that.”
All infrastructure projects in the UK cost more than their equivalents in continental Europe. “The insane costs associated with planning applications in the UK, something that you could see in the proposed London Themes Crossing, which recently spent £267 million just on planning paperwork.”
There’s a ton of NIMBYism along the route, forcing them to spend billions building rail tunnels despite it being perfectly feasible to build it overland.
Between London and Birmingham lies the sort of gentile English landscape that people who’ve never visited the UK believe the whole country looks like, a green swath of rolling hills, country lanes and posh blokes wearing tweed. Unfortunately, it turns out that the sort of people who live in this landscape hate the idea of London politicians plonking a fancy new train line right in the middle of it.
“Some countries like Japan can do tunneling at a reasonable cost. The UK is not among that group.”
Then there’s the well-paid army of white collar consultants, which will be familiar to any observer of California’s high speed rail project. “Among them were 40 employees paid more than £150,000 a year, and chief executives with higher salaries than any other public official in Britain.” Nice work if you can get it.
“In July of 20123 the government’s own infrastructure watchdog branded HS2 as unachievable saying it could not be delivered in its current form.”
The kicker: HS2 may never make it to central London, as building there is too expensive. “Rather than terminating at Euston Station in central London, HS2 would now end at Old Oak Common,” a suburban station, where they’re expected to catch local connections. “The new line will cost of tens of billions get you from Birmingham to central London less quickly than you can do it at the moment.”
But they’ve already spent £40 million for two top-of-the-line boring machines from Germany to dig the Old Oak Common to Euston segment. Current plans are to bury them in hope they might be used later.
“Hearing about stuff like this, it is tempting to wonder if, just maybe, the UK shouldn’t have listened to the results of the 2006 independent review into high speed rail written by Rod Edington before HS1 was even finished it concluded that highspeed rail simply isn’t worth it in Britain.”
“The money would be better spent on less sexy improvements, like line electrification and improving local bus services.”
And we all know why they’d never go that route: There simply aren’t enough opportunities for bureaucratic empire building and graft…
After decades of watching HSR and light rail projects in the US AND teaching state and local budgeting, my rule of thumb has always been that in the US any given such project will cost at least double the last estimate used to support passage of the measure creating the project, and ridership will come in at half the number used to justify building it. That has generally been correct but too conservative. Costs of triple are not unknow, and ridership of less than 40% neither.
Also, the time to build completion is ALWAYS at least double.
To my knowledge (I quit checking when I retired a couple of years ago) the only light rail system that breaks even on current costs is the one built for the Salt Lake City Winter Olympics. It breaks even because the Mormon Church buys out the system for 6 months of each year and lets millions including huge numbers of visitors ride for free.
Rail is a nightmare of inefficiency for passengers.
There, I said it. Nobody wants to ride the rails when there are alternatives. Amtrack is so bloody painful that were you to suggest to me that I take it, I’d rather ride a bike to my destination. Same with all the “urban light rail”. Which has metamorphed into “Criminal Light Rail”, given that it allows easy access to suburbs for urban “yout”.
The raw fact is that you can’t make rail pay, for passengers. The big US rail companies knew that back in the 1960s, and were in the process of divesting from it. Then, idiots in Congress and elsewhere decided to force Amtrack on us, and here we are.
Even in Europe, passenger rail has to be heavily subsidized. It doesn’t pay, and high-speed rail doesn’t pay doubly. If you want to pay for it, fine… But, like with urban light rail, everyone looks at it as a “good idea… For everyone else.”
I had an acquaintance, back when I lived in the Puget Sound region. She was a huge advocate for light rail; wanted it, fought for it, went out making an annoyance of herself to get it implemented. Got it, and now? She’s been on it maybe twice… Too inconvenient and too unsafe for her. Ya can’t haul your groceries back to the apartment with a light rail pass…
Rail might work, if we’d built our cities differently and the culture had developed differently. At this stage of the game, however, about the only way you’re going to get people on trains is at gunpoint.
It’s like alternative power; it’s a good idea for everyone else, but you want that electricity always flowing out of your sockets, along with water out of the taps. Any interruption, and you’re going to be raising hell… Meanwhile, let those peasants over there live with intermittent wind power.
The whole thing is an exercise in wishful thinking: You can’t make passenger rail pay for itself, and the days of yore when you could build cheaply are long gone. What they should have done, they didn’t… And, here we are. Trying to deny that fact and go back to re-work everything? You’re nuts to try; the real solution would be to simply improve what we’ve got, which is a hybrid system that works reasonably well. Passenger cars are a necessary evil, and a hell of a lot more efficient than some people make believe.
The thing that kills me is that most of the advocates for these things will never, ever be the people using them. Why? Because, inconvenience. So, why do they advocate for them? Basically, they want the brownie points that come along with being the “good person who wants good things”. Never mind that they don’t work…
One thing that is rarely mentioned about commuter rail is that the huge capital costs (rolling stock, track, power and switchgear) are idle most of the time. Maybe 3 hours in the morning and 3 hours in the evening, 5 days a week. 30 hours a week, which is about 18% of it, it is generating cash flow– but it’s depreciating 100% of the week. In order to recover just the cost of capital, not to mention the labor costs of running it, you’d have to charge vastly more than rational people would pay. Of course it loses money. How could it not?
Great Britain is the country that _invented_ steam locomotives and railroads (pretty much) — Thomas Telford, Richard Trevithick, I.K. Brunel, George & Robert Stephenson…. And Britain is a compact, population-dense country, at least by comparison to the US.
Of course, for politicians actually completing the rail line means an end to the graft paid out to their supporters. So the best rail line is the one that’s never completed.
Thanks for posting this backstory. This guy does pop up in unlikely places; and he always starts off engagingly, and then devolves into a prissy snark. He reminds me of the guy that went to the rock concerts you were kinda interested in; and then he would tell you some of what you wanted to know, always bragging about how he went – and you didn’t.
The problem with modern rail projects is the same as many large highway projects – ridiculous permitting costs, NIMBYism, and insane requirements from government. If you want to build a good rail line, you need to be willing to make a lot of bureaucrats unhappy and pay up for the land.
I take commuter rail to work almost every day. It’s actually quite pleasant. I sometimes drive in if I am hauling stuff, but I prefer the train. The commuter rail trains are significantly better than the L train, which still beats a bus.
I’ve taken Amtrak a decent amount. It’s actually not that bad at short haul trips – long haul is slower than a plane but has vastly easier boarding and better leg room. If it connects where I would need to go, I would take it.
We have HSR here in Spain. And it can be useful if you live in the capitol, because like a spider in the middle of a web, practically every destination serviced by trains in Spain has to go through Madrid. Want to visit Leon in the north from Valencia in the East? Be prepared to spend 90 minutes combined at Chamartin and Atocha stations in Madrid. A trip that would, if offered, take 1.5 hours by plane runs you around 6.5 hours via HSR.
@Kirk: “Rail is a nightmare of inefficiency for passengers.”
That’s oversalting the broth a little. Rail service in W. Europe is quite nice and a few parts of the US are a fit for it.
I live in Boston and highly prefer the Acela to the airlines for traveling to Manhattan or Philly. Door to door times are competitive with flying and it is just more comfortable as you’re not shuffling from cab to TSA line to seat to cab and so on.
If we could actually build proper track alignments (the Acela runs on 19th-century tracks) then the existing trains could do the trip in half the time (they are TGV-based, and capable of 165MPH) and beat the shuttle even between Boston and DC.
As it is, the Northeast Corridor is (IIRC) the one part of Amtrak that actually runs an operating profit.
As far as California’s messy HSR project is concerned, we could simply implement a fleet of DC-3s right now between SF and LA for just ONE of the billions wasted on this pork elephant. The aircraft fly at high-speed rail speeds the entire distance (and don’t have to slow down on local rail), they can run on clean natural gas (of which there is no shortage in the foreseeable future), they won’t be stopped by earthquakes, they can even land at local airports, and we don’t have to build a single inch of track, a single tunnel, or add on a single power plant, and we’ll never need to take a fraction of an acre of productive farmland. Plus, they can also run from underserved secondary cities without local politicians forcing hella expensive route changes on the project. It’s old reliable tech, it has decades of proof it works, and best of all, you can fly one at an altitude that really lets you appreciate the beauty of California.
Except the last DC-3s rolled off the assembly line in 1950, and nobody uses them for anything but cargo anymore. And you’d be much harder pressed to find pilots type rated for them as opposed, to say, 737s.
I always laugh when people talk about how China is a Potemkin economy of “ghost cites.” Yeah, they wasted a lot of money on their tofu buildings, but the West, are expert at wasting money in their own way.
So 10 million man hours of labor in China and they get an HSR line and a couple useless cities. In the West the same 10 million hours we end up with 1/2 a useless HSR line. This waste is why we are no longer competitive in manufacturing.
Einstein supposedly said that we only use 13% of our brains. Well, I say that we only use 13% of our labor and the rest is wasted.
Chinese high speed rail is actually fast, useful, and cheap, or it was when I left six years ago.
It’s about fifty bucks to go from Changsha to Shenzhen first class, takes less than four hours, and goes every hour or so. That’s a five hundred mile road-trip – not recommended in the PRC – or a two hour flight, with attendant airport nonsense at each end.
Unprofitable? Probably. CCP accounting is a black hole from which only lies escape.
Workable in the US? Not a chance. While I have confidence in our government to handle the lying about costs and profits, HSR requires dedicated rail we couldn’t build and urban centers with 10 million people to link up.
[…] lies like a rug Baldilocks: If You Want To Know What’s Happening Over There BattleSwarm: HS2: UK’s £100 Billion Rail To Nowhere, also, LinkSwarm For October 27 Behind The Black: Russia’s Soyuz-2 rocket launches military […]
The lines that run in the densest parts of China do seem to be slightly profitable. But the rail lines built out in other parts of the country lose money hand over fist and are helping bankrupt local governments.
After decades of watching HSR and light rail projects in the US AND teaching state and local budgeting, my rule of thumb has always been that in the US any given such project will cost at least double the last estimate used to support passage of the measure creating the project, and ridership will come in at half the number used to justify building it. That has generally been correct but too conservative. Costs of triple are not unknow, and ridership of less than 40% neither.
Also, the time to build completion is ALWAYS at least double.
To my knowledge (I quit checking when I retired a couple of years ago) the only light rail system that breaks even on current costs is the one built for the Salt Lake City Winter Olympics. It breaks even because the Mormon Church buys out the system for 6 months of each year and lets millions including huge numbers of visitors ride for free.
The world really is going to hell isn’t it. We really are losing our ability to do big things.
Rail is a nightmare of inefficiency for passengers.
There, I said it. Nobody wants to ride the rails when there are alternatives. Amtrack is so bloody painful that were you to suggest to me that I take it, I’d rather ride a bike to my destination. Same with all the “urban light rail”. Which has metamorphed into “Criminal Light Rail”, given that it allows easy access to suburbs for urban “yout”.
The raw fact is that you can’t make rail pay, for passengers. The big US rail companies knew that back in the 1960s, and were in the process of divesting from it. Then, idiots in Congress and elsewhere decided to force Amtrack on us, and here we are.
Even in Europe, passenger rail has to be heavily subsidized. It doesn’t pay, and high-speed rail doesn’t pay doubly. If you want to pay for it, fine… But, like with urban light rail, everyone looks at it as a “good idea… For everyone else.”
I had an acquaintance, back when I lived in the Puget Sound region. She was a huge advocate for light rail; wanted it, fought for it, went out making an annoyance of herself to get it implemented. Got it, and now? She’s been on it maybe twice… Too inconvenient and too unsafe for her. Ya can’t haul your groceries back to the apartment with a light rail pass…
Rail might work, if we’d built our cities differently and the culture had developed differently. At this stage of the game, however, about the only way you’re going to get people on trains is at gunpoint.
It’s like alternative power; it’s a good idea for everyone else, but you want that electricity always flowing out of your sockets, along with water out of the taps. Any interruption, and you’re going to be raising hell… Meanwhile, let those peasants over there live with intermittent wind power.
The whole thing is an exercise in wishful thinking: You can’t make passenger rail pay for itself, and the days of yore when you could build cheaply are long gone. What they should have done, they didn’t… And, here we are. Trying to deny that fact and go back to re-work everything? You’re nuts to try; the real solution would be to simply improve what we’ve got, which is a hybrid system that works reasonably well. Passenger cars are a necessary evil, and a hell of a lot more efficient than some people make believe.
The thing that kills me is that most of the advocates for these things will never, ever be the people using them. Why? Because, inconvenience. So, why do they advocate for them? Basically, they want the brownie points that come along with being the “good person who wants good things”. Never mind that they don’t work…
Socialists and bureaucrats likes rail because it takes you where they want you to go and when.
California’s truncated High Speed Rail project is now at $ 128 Billion and climbing, with no end in sight. No more likely to be completed:
https://hsr.ca.gov/about/project-update-reports/2023-project-update-report/
https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2023-03-11/new-cost-estimate-for-high-speed-rail-puts-california-bullet-train-100-billion-in-the-red
One thing that is rarely mentioned about commuter rail is that the huge capital costs (rolling stock, track, power and switchgear) are idle most of the time. Maybe 3 hours in the morning and 3 hours in the evening, 5 days a week. 30 hours a week, which is about 18% of it, it is generating cash flow– but it’s depreciating 100% of the week. In order to recover just the cost of capital, not to mention the labor costs of running it, you’d have to charge vastly more than rational people would pay. Of course it loses money. How could it not?
Great Britain is the country that _invented_ steam locomotives and railroads (pretty much) — Thomas Telford, Richard Trevithick, I.K. Brunel, George & Robert Stephenson…. And Britain is a compact, population-dense country, at least by comparison to the US.
Of course, for politicians actually completing the rail line means an end to the graft paid out to their supporters. So the best rail line is the one that’s never completed.
[…] BRITANNIA: UK’s £100 Billion Rail To Nowhere. “All rationale for HS2 vanished, leaving the UK with a multi-billion pound bill just to slightly […]
Thanks for posting this backstory. This guy does pop up in unlikely places; and he always starts off engagingly, and then devolves into a prissy snark. He reminds me of the guy that went to the rock concerts you were kinda interested in; and then he would tell you some of what you wanted to know, always bragging about how he went – and you didn’t.
For Kirk’s pleasure — I recall a headline in the Onion that read, “98% of commuters prefer public transportation — for everyone else.”
That about sums up public transit, light rail, and Amtrak in the U.S. — it’s for someone else, brother, now let me get to my Chevy Tahoe.
The problem with modern rail projects is the same as many large highway projects – ridiculous permitting costs, NIMBYism, and insane requirements from government. If you want to build a good rail line, you need to be willing to make a lot of bureaucrats unhappy and pay up for the land.
I take commuter rail to work almost every day. It’s actually quite pleasant. I sometimes drive in if I am hauling stuff, but I prefer the train. The commuter rail trains are significantly better than the L train, which still beats a bus.
I’ve taken Amtrak a decent amount. It’s actually not that bad at short haul trips – long haul is slower than a plane but has vastly easier boarding and better leg room. If it connects where I would need to go, I would take it.
We have HSR here in Spain. And it can be useful if you live in the capitol, because like a spider in the middle of a web, practically every destination serviced by trains in Spain has to go through Madrid. Want to visit Leon in the north from Valencia in the East? Be prepared to spend 90 minutes combined at Chamartin and Atocha stations in Madrid. A trip that would, if offered, take 1.5 hours by plane runs you around 6.5 hours via HSR.
@Kirk: “Rail is a nightmare of inefficiency for passengers.”
That’s oversalting the broth a little. Rail service in W. Europe is quite nice and a few parts of the US are a fit for it.
I live in Boston and highly prefer the Acela to the airlines for traveling to Manhattan or Philly. Door to door times are competitive with flying and it is just more comfortable as you’re not shuffling from cab to TSA line to seat to cab and so on.
If we could actually build proper track alignments (the Acela runs on 19th-century tracks) then the existing trains could do the trip in half the time (they are TGV-based, and capable of 165MPH) and beat the shuttle even between Boston and DC.
As it is, the Northeast Corridor is (IIRC) the one part of Amtrak that actually runs an operating profit.
As far as California’s messy HSR project is concerned, we could simply implement a fleet of DC-3s right now between SF and LA for just ONE of the billions wasted on this pork elephant. The aircraft fly at high-speed rail speeds the entire distance (and don’t have to slow down on local rail), they can run on clean natural gas (of which there is no shortage in the foreseeable future), they won’t be stopped by earthquakes, they can even land at local airports, and we don’t have to build a single inch of track, a single tunnel, or add on a single power plant, and we’ll never need to take a fraction of an acre of productive farmland. Plus, they can also run from underserved secondary cities without local politicians forcing hella expensive route changes on the project. It’s old reliable tech, it has decades of proof it works, and best of all, you can fly one at an altitude that really lets you appreciate the beauty of California.
Except the last DC-3s rolled off the assembly line in 1950, and nobody uses them for anything but cargo anymore. And you’d be much harder pressed to find pilots type rated for them as opposed, to say, 737s.
I always laugh when people talk about how China is a Potemkin economy of “ghost cites.” Yeah, they wasted a lot of money on their tofu buildings, but the West, are expert at wasting money in their own way.
So 10 million man hours of labor in China and they get an HSR line and a couple useless cities. In the West the same 10 million hours we end up with 1/2 a useless HSR line. This waste is why we are no longer competitive in manufacturing.
Einstein supposedly said that we only use 13% of our brains. Well, I say that we only use 13% of our labor and the rest is wasted.
Actually, China’s high speed rail network includes dozens of unprofitable rail lines and $1.8 trillion in debt. And it’s not just a couple of ghost cities. China’s real estate debt crisis makes ours look rational by comparison…
Chinese high speed rail is actually fast, useful, and cheap, or it was when I left six years ago.
It’s about fifty bucks to go from Changsha to Shenzhen first class, takes less than four hours, and goes every hour or so. That’s a five hundred mile road-trip – not recommended in the PRC – or a two hour flight, with attendant airport nonsense at each end.
Unprofitable? Probably. CCP accounting is a black hole from which only lies escape.
Workable in the US? Not a chance. While I have confidence in our government to handle the lying about costs and profits, HSR requires dedicated rail we couldn’t build and urban centers with 10 million people to link up.
[…] lies like a rug Baldilocks: If You Want To Know What’s Happening Over There BattleSwarm: HS2: UK’s £100 Billion Rail To Nowhere, also, LinkSwarm For October 27 Behind The Black: Russia’s Soyuz-2 rocket launches military […]
The lines that run in the densest parts of China do seem to be slightly profitable. But the rail lines built out in other parts of the country lose money hand over fist and are helping bankrupt local governments.