HS2 on Newsnight

If you saw the HS2 story on last week’s Newsnight, you might be surprised at how so much money has been spent, and how much digging done, including in this borough with parts of Wormwood Scrubs being churned up to break ground for Old Oak station, “the most connected station in the UK”, possibly without the project having been fully thought through.

HS2 Ltd has recently applied for a Compulsory Purchase Order on the area where they are doing works to divert the Sanford Brook Sewer, along the northern border of the Scrubs. 

HS2 is the most expensive high-speed railway in the world
– The Economist

The government’s own Major Projects Authority, like longstanding questioners including some of our members, seems have come to the conclusion late in the day that there could be more effective ways to spend huge amounts of capital, such as on East-West and local routes, but this isn’t news. At more than £33M a mile, the more than tripling of the original budget may have swung government thinking, but it was naïve to think this wouldn’t happen, given the expensive optioneering and some fairly obvious gold-plating, plus recent experience with projects like the almost identically overbudget 2012 Olympics – under the same leadership – and Crossrail, now over 3 years late. It is more than a little concerning that such projects continually require a somewhat childish suspension of disbelief, or more politely “optimism bias”, in order to get off the ground, only to wake up with a big government-largesse-fuelled hangover, discovering much of the budget has already been committed and/or spent – quite possibly inefficiently with questionable governance (Oakervee review conclusion 37), and perhaps not in the best place. 

In the case of the London Olympics, significant change or cancellation wasn’t an option of course, and we got new sports infrastructure and the repurposed housing via the Olympic village, plus a huge feel-good factor afterwards.  But HS2 has no medals, and fewer friends, dubbed by Sir Simon Jenkins as a “£100bn vanity project”, or more simply by The Economist “The most expensive high-speed railway in the world”.

HS2 Construction Old Oak/Scrubs [shepherdsbushw12.com]

Can an increasingly poor match with requirements now be blamed on COVID and a supposed waning of travel between cities – often a mainstay of the justification?  Not really, video conferencing has been around for decades, and the needs of ordinary people, now relabelled the levelling-up agenda, were secondary in the requirements – probably the root of the problem.  Members of the Society may have spotted the writing on the wall in the article a year ago where the gambit of high speed rail was set out using international comparators, and the reality of electric vehicles was suggested as potentially undermining its green credentials (if indeed they are as claimed, when the embodied carbon from concrete has been factored in).  We’d like to think Government read the article, but it’s unfortunate if ministers have again been captured by the allure of diggers & Hi-Viz, locally on Wormwood Scrubs, but in many other places too – Hammersmith Bridge excepted.

TBM “Florence” in the Chilterns [HS2 Ltd]

Looking at the situation more positively, and considering what has already been dug, a more appropriate project might be quite the reverse of what is mooted as a new approach – cutting off the northern legs. High Speed rail viability increases with distance up to about a 3hr journey time – the Birmingham route is right on the lower limit of accepted high-speed viability at 100 miles, more a sop to get the project off the ground at lowest(!) cost – the Oakervee Review concurs in conclusion 54.  Distraction by way of mooted “high-speed” links Leeds / Manchester, is muddle – in 36 miles, half the length of Crossrail, “high speed” wouldn’t achieved for long enough to be worthwhile.

• High Speed
• Most Connected

In addition to the allure of diggers & Hi-Viz, politician’s other love affair – “High Speed” – muddles the thinking and significantly inflates costs, having possibly forgotten other recent high speed stories. Could there be a trade-off between the apparent peripatetic need for high speed wireless, high speed broadband, and high speed trains?  Where next might the “high speed” mantra be applied – Government? Surely not!

Berlin – double decker train with bikes

There’s always been the option of building a conventional railway if it’s capacity that’s needed. Not sexy, but quicker, cheaper and less controversial to build, plus arguably more appropriate to UK geography. Capacity can be as high (more trains/hr, less distance between), or significantly higher with spacious double-deck carriages as in many other countries, with inclusive features like easy access bike spaces, plus lower energy use in building and running it.

But more importantly, taking testosterone-fuelled “high speed” blinkers off, to prioritise a people-centred approach focussing on their needs over a few “saved” minutes, providing access to a wider population, and their various use cases, one can have more stopping points and more environmentally friendly routes, better suited to ordinary people, as opposed to needing premium/business “high speed” fares to pay for it all.  The rail cost problem begins and ends with a relatively low intensity use of a high-maintenance, single-purpose infrastructure – it needs all the inclusion it can get, and still many decades to pay back.

Old Oak station might be “the most connected”, but to what? Viability significantly depends on OPDC, which given the shenanigans thereabouts continues to have a cloud over it – its only significant use currently would be as Crossrail Interchange, because substantive local public transport remains unplanned and unfunded (check the current PTAL rating of 0 or 1).  But if you’d decided to build a large Old Oak station anyway, for understandable strategic reasons, why then tunnel HS2 to Euston at huge expense, running an almost parallel path of just 5 miles into town? Passengers have to get on or off the train somewhere after all – Oakervee mentions this in §12.9.  Crossrail runs nearly twice as many trains per hour as HS2 is planned to, and like HS2, has capacity for more.

If, as planned, a significant proportion of passengers swap to Crossrail and other services at Old Oak, such as the link the Heathrow, there is little need for the gold-plated leg into Euston including its almost complete new station at £5bn, which despite the gold-plating, still doesn’t connect to HS1/Channel Tunnel.  If they don’t, why build such a large Old Oak station?  Perhaps it hasn’t been thought through – so we build both!  This is a question the Oakervee review looked at and why Euston has now been scaled back a little, but not enough to excite the Chancellor.   The decision to keep Euston (§12.10) appears based on the now shelved Crossrail 2, TfL projections and Mayoral preferences, which clearly now need re-examination, as does its possible saviour –  decent connectivity to HS1.  Somewhat hilariously, a 2020 FOI response to the conundrum states “…provision of an enhanced walking route between Euston and St. Pancras would provide a positive option for passengers connecting between HS2 and HS1 services”.  High Speed, followed by a half-mile walk with baggage for an International trip – really? It wasn’t dated April 1 either. Anyone who hasn’t been north of Euston recently though will be amazed by the moonscape thereabouts, only to see similar happening just 5 miles west.  Muddled thinking.

If we still believe high speed rail is the right 21st century solution for transport in the UK, then to do it properly, HS2 might have been better advertised as London to Manchester or simply “The North” nonstop, at 350km/h or faster. A focussed Blue Riband one hour service, making a trip to Manchester no longer than a trip across town on the Underground – now that would be a clear and visionary project – more especially if costs and fares were under control so people could afford to use it – mirroring the original Tokyo-Osaka Shinkansen, opened for the last Tokyo Olympics in 1964.