HS2 delayed again?

[Fazaar1889]

Not suprised at all. Might as well use the extra time to layout the groundwork to build between Birmingham and the north. Meanwhile China will build another 10,000 km

 

[The Planner]

Not suprised at all. Might as well use the extra time to layout the groundwork to build between Birmingham and the north. Meanwhile China will build another 10,000 km

How can they do that when it has no funding etc etc

 

[Shrop]

HS2 delays have been featured on here before, but this is beyond a joke. This morning’s news widely reports an expected further delay in the opening of HS2, beyond 2033. Construction has already been underway for several years, and yet here is a further delay to BEYOND ANOTHER EIGHT YEARS in the future, and all for a railway which is not much over 100 miles long.

Compare this to the Beijing to Shanghai railway which is 809 miles long and took just a shade over three years from start of construction to having their frequent high speed trains running. In the UK we quickly succumb to propaganda about the Chinese and use it as an excuse not to make comparisons, but just how many more excuses can we keep making? When I visited China in 2005 as their route was being discussed, I spoke to someone whose house was in the path of the proposed rail route, and it was nothing like the horror story that the media in the west likes to portray. On the one hand he had no choice about having to sell his house, but on the other hand he was being offered 20% over the market value for it, which was rather different from simply having it bulldozed, as we might be told by some of our western media.

Then we could look at Spain, France, Japan, Italy, even Morocco, Turkey and Indonesia, and against any of these, progress in the UK looks absolutely pathetic. The question is, should we really keep defaulting to finding excuse after excuse after excuse, or should we be looking to many other countries and taking inspiration from them? Just how has the UK, the fore-runner of world rail development 200 years ago, now become such a woeful “can’t do” country?

 

[Stossgebet]

How can they do that when it has no funding etc etc

They can do what governments seem to do best. Spend money on pre-planning infrastructure investment, vice the money they would have actually spent on previously planned and promised projects. They can always seem to find endless amounts for the bureaucracy of projects up until spades get to start digging.

 

[NCT]

They can do what governments seem to do best. Spend money on pre-planning infrastructure investment, vice the money they would have actually spent on previously planned and promised projects. They can always seem to find endless amounts for the bureaucracy of projects up until spades get to start digging.

It's beyond parody now.

 

[Bletchleyite]

It's beyond parody now.

Don't forget so was the Lizzie and indeed "Thameslink 2000" which really became Thameslink 2015ish. However now they're open people love them.

 

[JonathanH]

Don't forget so was the Lizzie and indeed "Thameslink 2000" which really became Thameslink 2015ish. However now they're open people love them.

Yes, but at least 10% of the current UK population will have passed before the very first part of it opens, which is probably why they have no interest in it.

 

[NCT]

Don't forget so was the Lizzie and indeed "Thameslink 2000" which really became Thameslink 2015ish. However now they're open people love them.

True... Thameslink's delay was mainly pre-construction though? KO2's construction period of 2014-2018 was pretty swift.

Crossrail had a construction period of 2010-2022 - so 12 years. Again, long periods of delays were in the pre-construction talking.

HS2 from inception around 2008(?) to spades in the ground by 2020 was pretty 'efficient' by British standards. 2020 - 2037 as a construction period takes the biscuit somewhat ... accepting it's a much much longer route length than Crossrail.

 

[Nicholas Lewis]

Don't forget so was the Lizzie and indeed "Thameslink 2000" which really became Thameslink 2015ish. However now they're open people love them.

Of course but to suggest this is going to take another ten years is indefensible. Remember we are celebrating 200 years of being the first country to introduce public railways and that railway was built with the graft of men and horses. We can do far better than this writ HS1 and the Selby diversion before that as examples. I suspect this is politically motivated and Wilde once hes got a grip and put the project on a firm footing will improve on that date.

 

[OvergroundMatt]

I think the Telegraph piece is somewhat spun to imply that it's a government "decision" to delay the opening - the BBC writeup is more straightforward and says that Alexander will acknowledge there is "no reasonable way to deliver" the railway line on schedule and within budget – which seems the more likely scenario. The Mark Wild report will make interesting reading...

 

[NCT]

I wish journalists would be clear with price bases, background inflation, construction inflation and real cost rises in their reporting ...

 

[SynthD]

We can do far better than this

There is an important distinction to make. We are capable of the engineering to do it at all, and to do it at a reasonably fast pace (considering 21st century H&S, planning, etc). But we aren’t capable of long term economics that favour funding that fast and overall cheaper pace of work.

 

[InTheEastMids]

Very interesting thread on Bluesky by a gentleman called Michael Dnes (now a consultant but formerly a civil servant in DfT). He suggests that Heidi Alexander's speech today about HS2's failure, may in fact be a precursor to renewing commitment to high speed rail, based on 4 key observations

• Government is obliged to take a stance on the remains of HS2

Due to the HS2 (Crewe-Manchester) bill still in Parliament, the Crichel Down rule on property purchases, and that Govt is about to present its Infrastructure Strategy, and "strategy" means choices about things that do and do not get progressed.

• Government paused the land sales on the Manchester route
• Government has just endorsed the most complicated unbuilt piece of HS2, where the business case won’t work without a connection to the south.

Liverpool-Manchester, which involves the really costly bit of Ph2b West tunnels from Manchester Airport and new stations at Airport and Piccadilly, and which he does not think would get funded purely on the basis of interconnectivity within the North or North West. Having committed to Euston, and built OOC to Handsacre and into the middle of Birmingham, the bits left over are much more straightfoward.

• Government seems to have left a big HS2-sized patch of fog in its spending plans, exactly where next week’s infrastructure announcement will materialise.

...based on a reading of the exact wording of the Spending Review text with his Civil Service hat on.

Anyway, this is set out in more detail in his Substack article, which I would recommend looking over (link; £free)

The next train to arrive will be...

Is the government about to announce HS2 to Manchester?

michaeldnes1.substack.com

 

[Farnborough]

On the Beeb

HS2 line opening to be delayed as review finds 'litany of failure'

The Transport Secretary is expected to say there's "no reasonable way to deliver" the line on time.

www.bbc.co.uk

The opening of HS2 will be delayed beyond the target date of 2033, the government will announce but it is not expected to say when the high speed railway line will begin operating.

And it's all the previous Government's fault...

 

[Norm_D_Ploom]

HS2 delays have been featured on here before, but this is beyond a joke. This morning’s news widely reports an expected further delay in the opening of HS2, beyond 2033. Construction has already been underway for several years, and yet here is a further delay to BEYOND ANOTHER EIGHT YEARS in the future, and all for a railway which is not much over 100 miles long.

Compare this to the Beijing to Shanghai railway which is 809 miles long and took just a shade over three years from start of construction to having their frequent high speed trains running. In the UK we quickly succumb to propaganda about the Chinese and use it as an excuse not to make comparisons, but just how many more excuses can we keep making? When I visited China in 2005 as their route was being discussed, I spoke to someone whose house was in the path of the proposed rail route, and it was nothing like the horror story that the media in the west likes to portray. On the one hand he had no choice about having to sell his house, but on the other hand he was being offered 20% over the market value for it, which was rather different from simply having it bulldozed, as we might be told by some of our western media.

Then we could look at Spain, France, Japan, Italy, even Morocco, Turkey and Indonesia, and against any of these, progress in the UK looks absolutely pathetic. The question is, should we really keep defaulting to finding excuse after excuse after excuse, or should we be looking to many other countries and taking inspiration from them? Just how has the UK, the fore-runner of world rail development 200 years ago, now become such a woeful “can’t do” country?

I'm sure that the offer of re-education if they refused had nothing to do with it.

 

[Palmerston]

Interesting, thank you.

 

[NCT]

Very interesting thread on Bluesky by a gentleman called Michael Dnes (now a consultant but formerly a civil servant in DfT). He suggests that Heidi Alexander's speech today about HS2's failure, may in fact be a precursor to renewing commitment to high speed rail, based on 4 key observations

Due to the HS2 (Crewe-Manchester) bill still in Parliament, the Crichel Down rule on property purchases, and that Govt is about to present its Infrastructure Strategy, and "strategy" means choices about things that do and do not get progressed.

Liverpool-Manchester, which involves the really costly bit of Ph2b West tunnels from Manchester Airport and new stations at Airport and Piccadilly, and which he does not think would get funded purely on the basis of interconnectivity within the North or North West. Having committed to Euston, and built OOC to Handsacre and into the middle of Birmingham, the bits left over are much more straightfoward.

...based on a reading of the exact wording of the Spending Review text with his Civil Service hat on.

Anyway, this is set out in more detail in his Substack article, which I would recommend looking over (link; £free)

The next train to arrive will be...

Is the government about to announce HS2 to Manchester?

michaeldnes1.substack.com

'Confirms' (probably too strong a word) what I've been noticing, but then I've been noticing the things I want to see to draw conclusions that make me feel better ...

Fingers crossed ...

 

[HSTEd]

It's pretty clear, in my view, that any and all HS2 Ltd design work is tainted at this point.

I don't think any of it can be trusted to be deliverable on anything even resembling the claimed budgets.

Any new high speed rail project has to start from square one.

 

[Zomboid]

I think the government have already said that they won't be giving any new work to HS2 ltd.

Which of course doesn't mean they won't get someone else to build some new bits of railway. (And nor does it mean that they will).

 

[FMerrymon]

I wish journalists would be clear with price bases, background inflation, construction inflation and real cost rises in their reporting ...

Yes, the bbc article has a few inaccuracies. Always good to complain if you have the time, they do it with other infrastructure projects too.

2 years would make it 2031 wouldn't it? The schedule was 2029-2033 up until now.

== Doublepost prevention - post automatically merged: Wednesday at 11:11 ==

I think the government have already said that they won't be giving any new work to HS2 ltd.

Which of course doesn't mean they won't get someone else to build some new bits of railway. (And nor does it mean that they will).

By now, they have the experience, so now we will lose that

 

[Peter Mugridge]

It's entirely down to the politicians; they're the ones who insisted on the contracts being "cost plus" in the first place, and they're the ones who keep changing the specifications with little, if any, regard to work already carried out.

As long as the lesson is learned that what Government should be doing is saying: "This is what we want; here's how much your budget is - you're the experts, we aren't... just get on and build it. If it goes over budget, it's up to you to find the extra - not us!"

That lesson, though, will never be learned will it?

2 years would make it 2031 wouldn't it? The schedule was 2029-2033 up until now.

Yes, but there's no way any media outlet won't sensationalise it by just adding the two years to the longer date is there? Simply because it makes it sound worse, and that's what sells papers and gets viewers and clicks.

 

[NCT]

I don't know much about construction and contracting, but here's an article from someone I have time for saying cost-plus contracting is good ...

Cost-Plus Contracting is Good

Because I write a lot about government waste, I get to interact with people who complain a lot about government waste, which exposes me to a range of views, some more reasonable than others. The le…

pedestrianobservations.com

 

[FMerrymon]

As long as the lesson is learned that what Government should be doing is saying: "This is what we want; here's how much your budget is - you're the experts, we aren't... just get on and build it. If it goes over budget, it's up to you to find the extra - not us!"

That lesson, though, will never be learned will it?

It sounds like they are going to blame the previous administrations for much of it. Rescheduling in 2023 apparently added £3.1bn in 2019 prices to the cost - the delay is likely from that as well. How much has redesigning Euston several times cost and then maintaining the site with minimal work? Cancellation has added cost to the full programme cost too.

 

[Zomboid]

By now, they have the experience, so now we will lose that

It's pretty likely that a lot of the same characters will show up in the actual engineering positions of any new organisation. People with experience of designing and building a new high speed railway aren't exactly ten a penny in the UK.

Senior management and non-technical roles are probably less likely.

 

[HSTEd]

By now, they have the experience, so now we will lose that

The problem is the experience is all terrible.

And it seems doubtful, given the succesful whistleblowing claims about very dodgy costing practices, that any of the claimed optimisations and value engineering can be trusted.
Just an example of a whistleblower (as given in the link):

From early on, Stephen Cresswell thought High Speed 2’s (HS2) predicted price tag was “an absolute joke”. If he happened to be right, it wasn’t funny. When Cresswell turned whistleblower to warn of the railway’s soaring expense, it cost him his job and, for a time, his health.

Earlier this month at an employment tribunal in Croydon, south London, he won almost £320,000 in compensation from HS2 Ltd after he was removed from the rail project for raising concerns that its true cost would be significantly higher than bosses were admitting. The price was being “actively misrepresented”, he had warned repeatedly.

The only way to be confident we aren't just going to fall into exactly the same trap yet again would be to get an entirely new team, discard any and all design work and start from a blank sheet. Complete with a new analysis on how high speed rail can best be employed in the UK context.

EDIT:
Edited to add additional context.

 

[Peter Mugridge]

It sounds like they are going to blame the previous administrations for much of it. Rescheduling in 2023 apparently added £3.1bn in 2019 prices to the cost - the delay is likely from that as well. How much has redesigning Euston several times cost and then maintaining the site with minimal work? Cancellation has added cost to the full programme cost too.

Well, exactly - it's perfectly clear that the previous government is directly to blame for that; lots of us on here and elsewhere were warning at the time that this would be the result weren't we?

 

[The Planner]

By now, they have the experience, so now we will lose that

The contractors are where the experience lies. Also just means that people just migrate from HS2 to any new organisation.

 

[NCT]

As long as the lesson is learned that what Government should be doing is saying: "This is what we want; here's how much your budget is - you're the experts, we aren't... just get on and build it. If it goes over budget, it's up to you to find the extra - not us!"

That lesson, though, will never be learned will it?

Again, far from being an expert on this, my understanding was Edinburgh tram (phase 1) construction was awarded on this basis, but the City of Edinburgh still had to pick up the tab.

 

[HSTEd]

Fixed price contracts on schemes with enormous risk, like HS2 etc, tend to result in huge bids as the companies have to hedge against risks that could easily bankrupt them.

 

[bib]

Anyone got a vague idea of the timeline for the rest of the OOC-Curzon section?
I'm assuming they are over 50% of the way through main civils so maybe another 4? years. Then what, 2? years for systems fitout, 1 year for testing and trial running? But that only gets you to 2032, so there must be more time required somewhere. I suppose there's also stations to complete but I wouldn't imagine they will be the main blocker.