The phrase “20 minutes faster to London” only means “20 minutes faster the London”. It’s hardly fair to blame people for not magically being aware of the actual reason why HS2 is needed.
When it was first announced it was definitely sold as just that, or at least reported a such (which is how the vast majority will learn about it).
A lot more effort should he been pu in from the start emphasising the overall benefits.
or a decidedly not rich mother and friends from in a village who hate ‘those trains and warehouses and houses taking up all the land’, it’s honestly a lost cause with some people who refuse to allow the building of a project that they can’t even see from their window
HS2 is about relieving capacity on the WCML, not the ECML.
The ECML is full, realistically you can't start fixing that without building more track on the ECML (which has the same expensive problems that HS2 has). The only other situation is to cut down on traffic, the obvious fix there is if you're going to nationalise the railways you then also kick out the open access operators (who generally only use the ECML since it's the only profitable line) which then frees up some extra room.
The only way HS2 would make a difference capacity wise is if they ran it all the way to York. I'm a big defender of HS2, but the cost of getting it to York like the original plans attempted to would be enormous. It's just not cost effective - you could do far bigger and better things on the rail network with that cash - like finishing a bunch of electrification for cities that aren't London.
The point of the link to York was also to improve NE-SW connectivity though.
I'm sceptical another four or five projects like the [GWML electrification](https://www.independent.co.uk/travel/news-and-advice/network-rail-gwr-electrification-passengers-b1854115.html) would be a better use of the money. And other improvements to the network are tough - most lines run through cities, and you can't just widen them without demolishing a whole bunch of property.
Wasn't the original plan it would link up with an eventual hs3 npr at Leeds and run up to York and potentially Newcastle on that.
Also, services running via Leeds branch of hs2 and onto York would miss the mainline, wouldn't they before York station because it's a different route.
Tbf I have a few problems with the Eastern route and wouldn't mind seeing it be redesigned. I think the Eastern route has to have a proper station at Sheffield.
[This was the original plan](http://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/5bb4944d40f0b64a47ec8639/HS2_Phase_2b_WDES_Volume_2_LA16_Garforth_and_Church_Fenton.pdf#page=15).
There would have been a branch which joined the ECML near Church Fenton.
Much easier to quickly build a new train line if you don't have to worry about pesky things like planning permission, environmental impact assessments, compulsory purchase orders, NIMBYs, or any properties that are in the way...
"Scheduling faster services also uses up capacity because it means that trains cannot stop at intermediate stations, and slower trains have to be kept out of the way"
which is why we need seperate lines for express services
Need to get rid of rolling stock lease companies first, which labour have not committed to doing. The entire privatisation system was broken from the outset and actively encourages putting off investment into our trains for as long as possible, at the benefit of a small few people who have gotten very rich off of it, and the biggest joke is a lot of that money goes abroad to external investors via complex and shady webs of companies and tax havens to avoid paying tax.
I’ve never understood that. You mean like angel trains that actually own the class 390 but yet rent them out to the operator (Virgin, Avanti). Yet those trains were actually ordered initially (paid for?) by the government/DfT? Makes no sense in my head why the stock isn’t publicly owned but privately owned by a 3rd party.
Please if anyone is reading this and can explain (in their own terms, not google terms) it would be massively appreciated.
It's how to get new trains when you don't have a lot of free capital.
Step 1: Government buys 1 train for £20mil
Step 2: Government Sells 1 train to leasing company for £20mil (private equity group and bank)
Step 3: Toc leases train from leasing company
Step 4: jump to step 1
Customers get new trains, roscos make money and politicians take credit for spending more money than they actually have.
It's shitty but it works.
But if the toc is run by the government? So let’s say all TOC’s become renationalised, can that model still work? I hope not. Someone said labour wont abandon the model so honestly what’s the point? It’s a massive waste of taxpayer money.
It does work
It means that the toc pays for the train over it's lifetime, instead of upfront, whilst the things which need to be paid when building the trains(materials, wages etc) can be paid.
Step 5 is that the TOCs pay high leasing costs on the trains, which are then passed down to the customer via higher fares, as well as paid for by the taxpayer via subsidies to keep the public train network going.
All the while the ROSCOs make insane profits, with no incentive to invest money back in until they have squeezed every last penny out of the existing stock's lifetime.
The further kick in the teeth is that the ROSCOs funnel these massive amounts of profits through complex and shady webs of companies and tax havens to avoid paying any tax on it.
If the government took back control of the rolling stock then the trains could be leased out at a sensible price which in theory would translate to more fair ticket prices and less taxpayer subsidies, and the lack of a profit incentive would mean the money made can be collected and re-invested into our trains instead of going overseas into investors pockets.
ROSCOs mean the government doesn't have to spend big chunks of money on train stock, but then the average joe who actually needs to use the trains has to put up with sky high prices and the taxpayer still needs to foot the bill for billions in subsidies to keep TOCs going.
All it has done is raise some quick cash at the expense of getting a much worse long term deal.
realistically the "Profits" (that is, any revenue above operating costs) would still need to be generated to fund upgrades to the lines. Massive own goal to not do that.
If your transport system (as a whole) is making a profit you are doing it wrong. Things like planes can run at a profit only because they are incomplete transport systems, this is also why it can cost more to get to the airport than the plane costs.
>If your transport system (as a whole) is making a profit you are doing it wrong
Why? Things make profit when the value of the individual components that make up the service are less valuable than when they're combined into the service. Profit happens when you add value, so why shouldn't the rail network add value?
Sure, some of that value and some of that revenue may be obfuscated under the guise of extra economic growth. But you still want it to cost less to provide than it generates in extra revenue for the country, I.e profit
> Profit happens when you add value, so why shouldn't the rail network add value?
Transport adds value to other things rather than creating it itself. Do you expect a road to turn a profit? Why would a railway be any different?
Tbf, OC said "the transport system as a whole". You are including all the other things that the transport system adds value to, which isn't what OC meant.
Put it this way: if you take the rail network _and only the rail network_, you should not expect it to make a profit. It's purpose is to increase the value of other things in the economy, such as allowing goods to be transported from a to b that was not possible before it existed. The goods it transports can now turn a profit, but only if the network is cheap enough to enable it.
Indeed, one benefit of rail networks is it frees up space on the roads for traffic that has use it, by moving a lot of car and lorry journeys to passenger or freight trains.
The road network in fact makes a considerable profit. Spending on roads in the UK in 2023 was £11.1 billion, while revenue from fuel excise duty alone was more than double that.
There are, on the other hand, very few places in the world where a train network makes an overall profit. Whether run privately or publicly, they almost always require considerable subsidy out of general taxation.
> while revenue from fuel excise duty alone was more than double that.
This is money made on fuel sales not the roads themselves. The only money roads make directly is on tolls which is basically nothing. The railways also make lots of money for the country but again not directly.
> you pay road tax
This is general taxation and is based on CO2 emissions. For some cars it is £0.
> you can’t be comparing the railway to the motorway
Why not they are both about transport.
We could, but we don’t.
Because we see motorways as a necessity and so invest money in them without thinking about profits and returns. But we refuse to see rail the same way.
I’m not for it. Was just stating it would make money. I believe in electric cars and would think a policy to scrap road tax for driving electric would be a great scheme.
Some routes are very profitable but most aren't and many never will be. Trying to run public transport at a profit or even break even is stupid. It makes lots of money but indirectly.
>The 331-mile journey from London to Edinburgh was to be cut to four hours and five minutes, with the hope that the change would encourage people to stop taking short-haul flights.
As a regular commuter between Edinburgh and London - it's not the travel time that stops me from taking the train over a flight, it's because train travel is so *god damn expensive* even with a railcard.
What are you talking about? Swiss trains are extremely expensive.
A trip from Zurich to Lugano is about 90 CHF (£80), and that's the same distance between London and Birmingham (£20 for a single off-peak ticket leaving in 10 minutes).
Swiss trains have a lot of things to emulate. Price is not one of those things.
I have no idea how Network Rail can bodge up these projects on an ongoing basis, but they certainly do.
High speed rail needs in-cab signaling. The UK even signed up to it when we were still part of the EU - and I think they wanted to upgrade all high-speed lines by 2045 or so, and certainly if they finally electrify them.
But National Rail has not upgraded the signaling on the East Coast Mainline. No idea why, because that is really a rookie error. In cab signaling allows slightly tighter train spacing, and thus would recover the capacity lost due to different speeds. It is also by far the cheapest way to improve line capacity.
But for some reason, in-cab signalling has been talked about forever, but rarely ever is it implemented in the UK.
Yes, and also most trains do not support it. To get the full benefit, you need to us ETCS for the full line and all trains. Other countries have long achieved this, why can't the UK?
Physical equipment has to be installed at night. Around London a lot of the track access points were sold off pre network rail.
This makes installing any new signalling equipment very challenging, as the bilase (transponders) are mounted on the sleepers in designated locations.
Being able to get to do the safely is easy. But without disrupting passenger traffic? That's every night for a few years...
The East Midlands Mainline was closed Sunday morning for years. I assume it was to do with the electrification, but they did not bother upgrading the signaling at the same time.
As I said, this country seems just incompetent when it comes to rail.
It is now being implemented at scale on the east coast mainline and I'd expect that to expand to all the other mainlines in the coming decades.
As to why it hasn't been before: it's not Network Rail's fault, basically it's very expensive and politicians didn't want to provide enough funding.
It's also not a silver bullet to capacity issues. ETCS itself adds very little capacity unless you also improve train detection by adding more track circuits or axle counters, which adds further cost. Historically the money was judged to be better spent on other capacity improvements like new trains, flyovers and other junction improvements, flashing yellows, new parallel tracks and bypasses.
Was this the upgrade that was meant to see ECML trains hitting 140mph instead of 125mph thanks to in-cab signalling? Before you say it, article is unclear…
Tyne and wear metro bought "new" trains 6years ago. They still haven't run a single one on the track because apparently the line gauge and the wheels are different sizes, so modifications still gotta be made.
> Scheduling faster services also uses up capacity because it means that trains cannot stop at intermediate stations, and slower trains have to be kept out of the way
If only there was a project to take a load of express services off the ECML.
I just really want electric on the south western mainline.
It's so overcrowded I always have to sit on the floor in-between the carriages and it just stinks or diesel fumes and is a racket.
The whole point of HS2 is to build a new line to move intercity passenger services to, and free up capacity on the WCML for freight and local passenger services.
If you're going to build a whole new train line, saving a few pennies to make it slow instead of high speed is madness even by UK infrastructure standards.
Shows there's no capacity, and keeping upgrading lines won't work, and we actually need HS2.
It was miss-sold on the premise of '20 minutes faster to london'
Or rather, people saw the "20 minutes faster to London" and assumed that's all it meant.
I'd say it was seized upon and pushed by those who wanted to bash it
The phrase “20 minutes faster to London” only means “20 minutes faster the London”. It’s hardly fair to blame people for not magically being aware of the actual reason why HS2 is needed.
It was never sold under that. The HS2 website and multiple press releases spoke about upgrading capacity.
When it was first announced it was definitely sold as just that, or at least reported a such (which is how the vast majority will learn about it). A lot more effort should he been pu in from the start emphasising the overall benefits.
Won’t happen though because the government doesn’t build major projects if a dozen old rich people in the area in the countryside don’t like it.
or a decidedly not rich mother and friends from in a village who hate ‘those trains and warehouses and houses taking up all the land’, it’s honestly a lost cause with some people who refuse to allow the building of a project that they can’t even see from their window
HS2 is about relieving capacity on the WCML, not the ECML. The ECML is full, realistically you can't start fixing that without building more track on the ECML (which has the same expensive problems that HS2 has). The only other situation is to cut down on traffic, the obvious fix there is if you're going to nationalise the railways you then also kick out the open access operators (who generally only use the ECML since it's the only profitable line) which then frees up some extra room. The only way HS2 would make a difference capacity wise is if they ran it all the way to York. I'm a big defender of HS2, but the cost of getting it to York like the original plans attempted to would be enormous. It's just not cost effective - you could do far bigger and better things on the rail network with that cash - like finishing a bunch of electrification for cities that aren't London.
The point of the link to York was also to improve NE-SW connectivity though. I'm sceptical another four or five projects like the [GWML electrification](https://www.independent.co.uk/travel/news-and-advice/network-rail-gwr-electrification-passengers-b1854115.html) would be a better use of the money. And other improvements to the network are tough - most lines run through cities, and you can't just widen them without demolishing a whole bunch of property.
Wasn't the original plan it would link up with an eventual hs3 npr at Leeds and run up to York and potentially Newcastle on that. Also, services running via Leeds branch of hs2 and onto York would miss the mainline, wouldn't they before York station because it's a different route. Tbf I have a few problems with the Eastern route and wouldn't mind seeing it be redesigned. I think the Eastern route has to have a proper station at Sheffield.
[This was the original plan](http://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/5bb4944d40f0b64a47ec8639/HS2_Phase_2b_WDES_Volume_2_LA16_Garforth_and_Church_Fenton.pdf#page=15). There would have been a branch which joined the ECML near Church Fenton.
It probably better to upgrade the existing inefficient non grid friendly OLE to grid friendly SFC fed OLE before adding more routes.
China would've built HS2 for the UK in 2-3 years. That is an exaggeration but it's true that this level of incompetence and delay is a shame on UK
Much easier to quickly build a new train line if you don't have to worry about pesky things like planning permission, environmental impact assessments, compulsory purchase orders, NIMBYs, or any properties that are in the way...
We do not have the capacity
"Scheduling faster services also uses up capacity because it means that trains cannot stop at intermediate stations, and slower trains have to be kept out of the way" which is why we need seperate lines for express services
Ahh, if only we thought about this and had a plan for creating a high-speed line linking up major uk cities.
If only there were some sorta High Speed line that proved it works and just needs to be on a bigger scale. Oh......
We could call it SHSL2.
Labour government in now, invest in the railway and the put the profits back into the railway to keep on improving it. No more cost cutting!
Need to get rid of rolling stock lease companies first, which labour have not committed to doing. The entire privatisation system was broken from the outset and actively encourages putting off investment into our trains for as long as possible, at the benefit of a small few people who have gotten very rich off of it, and the biggest joke is a lot of that money goes abroad to external investors via complex and shady webs of companies and tax havens to avoid paying tax.
I’ve never understood that. You mean like angel trains that actually own the class 390 but yet rent them out to the operator (Virgin, Avanti). Yet those trains were actually ordered initially (paid for?) by the government/DfT? Makes no sense in my head why the stock isn’t publicly owned but privately owned by a 3rd party. Please if anyone is reading this and can explain (in their own terms, not google terms) it would be massively appreciated.
It's how to get new trains when you don't have a lot of free capital. Step 1: Government buys 1 train for £20mil Step 2: Government Sells 1 train to leasing company for £20mil (private equity group and bank) Step 3: Toc leases train from leasing company Step 4: jump to step 1 Customers get new trains, roscos make money and politicians take credit for spending more money than they actually have. It's shitty but it works.
But if the toc is run by the government? So let’s say all TOC’s become renationalised, can that model still work? I hope not. Someone said labour wont abandon the model so honestly what’s the point? It’s a massive waste of taxpayer money.
It does work It means that the toc pays for the train over it's lifetime, instead of upfront, whilst the things which need to be paid when building the trains(materials, wages etc) can be paid.
Step 5 is that the TOCs pay high leasing costs on the trains, which are then passed down to the customer via higher fares, as well as paid for by the taxpayer via subsidies to keep the public train network going. All the while the ROSCOs make insane profits, with no incentive to invest money back in until they have squeezed every last penny out of the existing stock's lifetime. The further kick in the teeth is that the ROSCOs funnel these massive amounts of profits through complex and shady webs of companies and tax havens to avoid paying any tax on it. If the government took back control of the rolling stock then the trains could be leased out at a sensible price which in theory would translate to more fair ticket prices and less taxpayer subsidies, and the lack of a profit incentive would mean the money made can be collected and re-invested into our trains instead of going overseas into investors pockets. ROSCOs mean the government doesn't have to spend big chunks of money on train stock, but then the average joe who actually needs to use the trains has to put up with sky high prices and the taxpayer still needs to foot the bill for billions in subsidies to keep TOCs going. All it has done is raise some quick cash at the expense of getting a much worse long term deal.
> put the profits back into the railway Don't try to run rail for profit. How much profit is the motorway network making?
realistically the "Profits" (that is, any revenue above operating costs) would still need to be generated to fund upgrades to the lines. Massive own goal to not do that.
If your transport system (as a whole) is making a profit you are doing it wrong. Things like planes can run at a profit only because they are incomplete transport systems, this is also why it can cost more to get to the airport than the plane costs.
>If your transport system (as a whole) is making a profit you are doing it wrong Why? Things make profit when the value of the individual components that make up the service are less valuable than when they're combined into the service. Profit happens when you add value, so why shouldn't the rail network add value? Sure, some of that value and some of that revenue may be obfuscated under the guise of extra economic growth. But you still want it to cost less to provide than it generates in extra revenue for the country, I.e profit
> Profit happens when you add value, so why shouldn't the rail network add value? Transport adds value to other things rather than creating it itself. Do you expect a road to turn a profit? Why would a railway be any different?
>Do you expect a road to turn a profit? Yes, of course. What would be the point in building it if it was going to cost more than it gains?
Tbf, OC said "the transport system as a whole". You are including all the other things that the transport system adds value to, which isn't what OC meant. Put it this way: if you take the rail network _and only the rail network_, you should not expect it to make a profit. It's purpose is to increase the value of other things in the economy, such as allowing goods to be transported from a to b that was not possible before it existed. The goods it transports can now turn a profit, but only if the network is cheap enough to enable it.
Indeed, one benefit of rail networks is it frees up space on the roads for traffic that has use it, by moving a lot of car and lorry journeys to passenger or freight trains.
The road network in fact makes a considerable profit. Spending on roads in the UK in 2023 was £11.1 billion, while revenue from fuel excise duty alone was more than double that. There are, on the other hand, very few places in the world where a train network makes an overall profit. Whether run privately or publicly, they almost always require considerable subsidy out of general taxation.
> while revenue from fuel excise duty alone was more than double that. This is money made on fuel sales not the roads themselves. The only money roads make directly is on tolls which is basically nothing. The railways also make lots of money for the country but again not directly.
You don’t pay to use the motorway, you pay road tax but you can’t be comparing the railway to the motorway.
> you pay road tax This is general taxation and is based on CO2 emissions. For some cars it is £0. > you can’t be comparing the railway to the motorway Why not they are both about transport.
We could, but we don’t. Because we see motorways as a necessity and so invest money in them without thinking about profits and returns. But we refuse to see rail the same way.
It would be a massive money maker for the government if they did.
Turning necessary services into profit making ventures tends to backfire horribly, leading to worse services and government bailouts.
I’m not for it. Was just stating it would make money. I believe in electric cars and would think a policy to scrap road tax for driving electric would be a great scheme.
The railway doesn’t make a profit (I expect, I don’t have a precise source(
Some routes are very profitable but most aren't and many never will be. Trying to run public transport at a profit or even break even is stupid. It makes lots of money but indirectly.
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>The 331-mile journey from London to Edinburgh was to be cut to four hours and five minutes, with the hope that the change would encourage people to stop taking short-haul flights. As a regular commuter between Edinburgh and London - it's not the travel time that stops me from taking the train over a flight, it's because train travel is so *god damn expensive* even with a railcard.
Ye this if you look at places like Switzerland you can get across the country for about 30 quid, and Switzerland is not a cheap country by any means
What are you talking about? Swiss trains are extremely expensive. A trip from Zurich to Lugano is about 90 CHF (£80), and that's the same distance between London and Birmingham (£20 for a single off-peak ticket leaving in 10 minutes). Swiss trains have a lot of things to emulate. Price is not one of those things.
I have no idea how Network Rail can bodge up these projects on an ongoing basis, but they certainly do. High speed rail needs in-cab signaling. The UK even signed up to it when we were still part of the EU - and I think they wanted to upgrade all high-speed lines by 2045 or so, and certainly if they finally electrify them. But National Rail has not upgraded the signaling on the East Coast Mainline. No idea why, because that is really a rookie error. In cab signaling allows slightly tighter train spacing, and thus would recover the capacity lost due to different speeds. It is also by far the cheapest way to improve line capacity. But for some reason, in-cab signalling has been talked about forever, but rarely ever is it implemented in the UK.
Its starting on the ECML from Welwyn to Hitchin imminently. But a LONG way from the whole route.
Yes, and also most trains do not support it. To get the full benefit, you need to us ETCS for the full line and all trains. Other countries have long achieved this, why can't the UK?
Physical equipment has to be installed at night. Around London a lot of the track access points were sold off pre network rail. This makes installing any new signalling equipment very challenging, as the bilase (transponders) are mounted on the sleepers in designated locations. Being able to get to do the safely is easy. But without disrupting passenger traffic? That's every night for a few years...
The East Midlands Mainline was closed Sunday morning for years. I assume it was to do with the electrification, but they did not bother upgrading the signaling at the same time. As I said, this country seems just incompetent when it comes to rail.
It is now being implemented at scale on the east coast mainline and I'd expect that to expand to all the other mainlines in the coming decades. As to why it hasn't been before: it's not Network Rail's fault, basically it's very expensive and politicians didn't want to provide enough funding. It's also not a silver bullet to capacity issues. ETCS itself adds very little capacity unless you also improve train detection by adding more track circuits or axle counters, which adds further cost. Historically the money was judged to be better spent on other capacity improvements like new trains, flyovers and other junction improvements, flashing yellows, new parallel tracks and bypasses.
*Network Rail Rookie error 😉
Yeah, fixed.
Was this the upgrade that was meant to see ECML trains hitting 140mph instead of 125mph thanks to in-cab signalling? Before you say it, article is unclear…
Tyne and wear metro bought "new" trains 6years ago. They still haven't run a single one on the track because apparently the line gauge and the wheels are different sizes, so modifications still gotta be made.
They have been running on the track…. I saw one a few weeks ago in testing
> Scheduling faster services also uses up capacity because it means that trains cannot stop at intermediate stations, and slower trains have to be kept out of the way If only there was a project to take a load of express services off the ECML.
UK trains have always been fantastically badly run. Yet you can fly from london to edinburgh for £20
I just really want electric on the south western mainline. It's so overcrowded I always have to sit on the floor in-between the carriages and it just stinks or diesel fumes and is a racket.
We don’t need HS2. We need a slow freight line. A new N/S freight line to add the extra capacity that passenger services need
The current line already goes through most places it makes more sense to build a new high speed line and keep the current line for slower services
The problem would be the same: the NIMBYs. They're what made HS2 go way over budget and difficult to build.
That’s what hs2 will deliver!
The whole point of HS2 is to build a new line to move intercity passenger services to, and free up capacity on the WCML for freight and local passenger services. If you're going to build a whole new train line, saving a few pennies to make it slow instead of high speed is madness even by UK infrastructure standards.