How much does it cost to run a train?

[davo882000]

Chronicle Live has announced that there will be additional 2 trains running from Newcastle to London Kings Cross via LNER.

I have done some hypothetical figures...

RE Cup Final 21.30 - LXC to Newcastle (£140.30) - two five coach trains with 604 seats

If we say 70% of seats are full and paid for by Single standard Adult fare - create the 70% as the main money earner

(no railcards / concessions/ child etc

(they are factored into the remaining 30% plus empty seats )

The figures are staggering....

604seats /100 x 70 (to create 70%) × £140.30= £59,318

Does it really cost £60k to run a train from say London to Newcastle?

My thoughts is what is the true cost of running a train on the ECML ? if open access operators can run trains in general cheaper ...How?

 

[66701GBRF]

Your 60k figure obviously includes profits so no it doesn’t ‘cost’ 60k to run that train.

 

[Egg Centric]

Are you asking for the marginal cost of an individual train or are you wanting the fixed costs amortised over it? Cause the figures will be *wildly* different.

 

[whoosh]

It's a five figure sum per month to lease a train. That's per coach.

 

[renegademaster]

Chronicle Live has announced that there will be additional 2 trains running from Newcastle to London Kings Cross via LNER.

I have done some hypothetical figures...

RE Cup Final 21.30 - LXC to Newcastle (£140.30) - two five coach trains with 604 seats

If we say 70% of seats are full and paid for by Single standard Adult fare - create the 70% as the main money earner

(no railcards / concessions/ child etc

(they are factored into the remaining 30% plus empty seats )

The figures are staggering....

604seats /100 x 70 (to create 70%) × £140.30= £59,318

Does it really cost £60k to run a train from say London to Newcastle?

My thoughts is what is the true cost of running a train on the ECML ? if open access operators can run trains in general cheaper ...How?

Mostly single standard is a bold assumption on a service like London Newcastle . Most people will be on Advances

 

[6Gman]

Chronicle Live has announced that there will be additional 2 trains running from Newcastle to London Kings Cross via LNER.

I have done some hypothetical figures...

RE Cup Final 21.30 - LXC to Newcastle (£140.30) - two five coach trains with 604 seats

If we say 70% of seats are full and paid for by Single standard Adult fare - create the 70% as the main money earner

(no railcards / concessions/ child etc

(they are factored into the remaining 30% plus empty seats )

The figures are staggering....

604seats /100 x 70 (to create 70%) × £140.30= £59,318

Does it really cost £60k to run a train from say London to Newcastle?

My thoughts is what is the true cost of running a train on the ECML ? if open access operators can run trains in general cheaper ...How?

I'm a little confused. Why assume people will be on Single Standard fares? How do people travel the other way?

== Doublepost prevention - post automatically merged: 28 Feb 2025 ==

Are you asking for the marginal cost of an individual train or are you wanting the fixed costs amortised over it? Cause the figures will be *wildly* different.

@Egg Centric is correct.

Having worked in planning charter trains in the past, the cost of a particular move can be very low or very high based on a whole range of variables involving timing, rolling stock and traincrew availability.

 

[Narrowgauge725]

I am traveling that day before this announcement the existing trains were completely full and LNER have sent a warning that the train is completely booked

 

[Horizon22]

From where to where and when. You'll get some wildly different figures.

 

[LNW-GW Joint]

Network Rail is spending £2 billion resignalling the ECML south of Grantham over the next few years.
Make sure your cost estimates include a portion of that (and other chunks of investment elsewhere).
There will be high access charges to LNER (and any other TOC) to cover the long-term costs of providing an intensive 125mph service on the route.
LNER's trains are hired from Hitachi/Agility with a 20+ year contract period - again the costs will represent the whole life and utilisation of those trains.
It's not quite "pay by the hour", but extra services will incur extra rolling stock costs.
Then you have to find/pay the train crews.

 

[officewalla]

Class 387 uses about a MW of energy to travel from Paddington to Didcot. Let's say £300 for 53 mile journey (assuming 28p per unit). If it is fully loaded at commuter time for a 12 car with 1000 people on it paying £30 for arguments sake, it quickly becomes clear that pure running costs are not that great. The fixed costs of leasing, staffing etc however do add up.

 

[Tilting007]

Class 387 uses about a MW of energy to travel from Paddington to Didcot. Let's say £300 for 53 mile journey (assuming 28p per unit). If it is fully loaded at commuter time for a 12 car with 1000 people on it paying £30 for arguments sake, it quickly becomes clear that pure running costs are not that great. The fixed costs of leasing, staffing etc however do add up.

And Track Access Charges!

 

[RyanOPlasty]

As rail tours supposedly only make a profit on the last coach, this gives the following ball park figures:

48x4 Dining Seats @ £250 = £48000
64x4 standard class @ £120 = £30720

Total income £78720 so the cost of running ~£70 000 for say 400 miles? £175 per mile.

I would expect that regular timetabled services would be much cheaper

 

[Bald Rick]

There are some interesting figures in the last Modern Railways. It costs LNER £24 per unit mile in rolling stock costs to run a train. Newcastle to Kings Cross and back via the Durham coast is going to be about £15k. Then add in crews, on board hosts, diesel, electricity, track access charges, costs of selling tickets, overhead costs, etc.…

 

[norbitonflyer]

Class 387 uses about a MW of energy to travel from Paddington to Didcot.

A megawatt is a unit of power (rate of using energy), not energy. Energy is measured in Joules (one second's output of a 1watt supply) or Megawatt-hours (one hour's output of a 1MW supply)

A class 387 is rated at 1.67MW, but I very much doubt it is operating at even 60% of full power for the hour or so it takes to get from Didcot to London, so the amopunt of energy it uses will be much less than 1MWh

 

[Bald Rick]

A megawatt is a unit of power (rate of using energy), not energy. Energy is measured in Joules (one second's output of a 1watt supply) or Megawatt-hours (one hour's output of a 1MW supply)

A class 387 is rated at 1.67MW, but I very much doubt it is operating at even 60% of full power for the hour or so it takes to get from Didcot to London, so the amopunt of energy it uses will be much less than 1MWh

Agreed, could be 1MWh for an 8 car train.

 

[king_walnut]

You also have to factor in the services that run with hardly anyone on board, I.E early morning and late at night. Or empty coaching stock moves. They'll be making a loss.

So that example where one service is taking £60k - that might be a handsome profit for that one service but it will be offset by the loss they made on others that day.

The profit margins on the railway are only a few percent at best.

 

[MargaretNoodle]

This thread has spurred me on to attempt to do some Calculations to work out the Energy Cost per Passenger Mile on the Railways for different types of trains.

According to data I found from the ORR, Class 390s, on average, consume about 29KWh/Mile. Let's assume that the trains are at capacity, which for a 9-Car 390 I think is 469 seats. So that works out to about 0.0618 KWh/Passenger Mile. Apparently, and correct me if I'm wrong, but TOCs pay £0.21/KWh for traction electricity. Giving us a rough total of £0.013/Passenger Mile.

Using similar data for the Class 379s, we find they average at about 17KWh/Mile and have a capacity of 209 seats. Again working this out with cost of electricity it comes to a total of about £0.017/Passenger Mile.

Finally, I thought I would investigate the costs for DMUs. According to a post on this site a single car of a Class 156 will use about 6mpg. This converts to 0.76 Litres of Diesel/Mile. Assuming a single car has 75 seats this equates to about 0.01 Litres/Passenger Mile. It seems quite hard to work out how much the TOCs pay for Diesel, but I think an upper bound would be around 80 pence/Litre. All together then £0.008/Passenger Mile.

This came as a bit of a shock to me as I assumed Electric traction would be much cheaper, and is a bit concerning. Delving a bit deeper it seems to me that this is due to old DMUs having less performance than EMUs so are using less energy and the railways being able to get Diesel much cheaper than Electricity (which is also true for the public).

 

[D6975]

I'm a little confused. Why assume people will be on Single Standard fares? How do people travel the other way?

GNER don't sell return tickets anymore. You have to buy seperate tickets for each direction.

 

[Clarence Yard]

These are booked extras to get people to/from an event so it’s all done at marginal cost.

The trains are already part of the Hitachi daily availability requirement so they are “free”. What you have to pay for is EC4T, VTAC, Station Access and crew/catering costs, plus some overheads for organising and supervising the services.

Should be a nicer little earner for LNER.

 

[MicroLithium]

This came as a bit of a shock to me as I assumed Electric traction would be much cheaper, and is a bit concerning

But you’re comparing an EMU at 120mph with a DMU at 70mph, so it’s apples to oranges. If you could get the 156 up to the same speed, it wouldn’t get 6mpg any more

 

[DEFarnes]

Here are some discussions regarding this by two guys who have no idea, and then one who has lots.

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[TheWalrus]

They used to estimate £1 per single carriage mile, plus staffing costs, but this was many years ago now!

 

[Rab Smith]

There's profit in it. If there wasn't, private companies wouldn't get involved. It's a simple as that.

 

[43066]

There's profit in it. If there wasn't, private companies wouldn't get involved. It's a simple as that.

Clearly some private companies will be making profits (ROSCOs on the payments they receive under their leases, TOCs earning fees under the NRCs) but doesn’t mean the system as a whole makes a profit. Although, of course, it also isn’t intended to.

As for individual trains, it depends how you allocate costs, but clearly not all services will cover their operational expenditure/share of fixed costs.

 

[bleeder4]

A friend of mine is currently in discussions with Vintage Trains about running a mainline steam train around the East Midlands circuit for him and his wedding guests for his wedding reception. I'll see if I can get some figures from him for what he's been quoted.

Private Trains | Vintage Trains

Travel aboard our Private Trains

vintagetrains.co.uk

 

[Bald Rick]

A friend of mine is currently in discussions with Vintage Trains about running a mainline steam train around the East Midlands circuit for him and his wedding guests for his wedding reception. I'll see if I can get some figures from him for what he's been quoted.

Private Trains | Vintage Trains

Travel aboard our Private Trains

vintagetrains.co.uk

The father of the bride must be minted.

 

[stuu]

My employer chartered a GWR HST from Cardiff to London and back c.2014. IIRC the cost was around £100 per seat back then. Although whether the cost of hiring a train has any connection to the actual cost of running it, including the infrastructure is a different matter

 

[Pegpilot]

At the risk of massive over-simplification, let's have a look at industry data for 22/23. Industry costs £25 Bn, train km 460 million, so cost/train km average £54 or so. But of course this hides massive differences between long IC sets and 2-car local DMU services. And the point has already been made about whether we include fixed costs. Anyone remember back in the 70s when BR ran weekend leisure trains using spare sets, cheap as chips ? On Southern we had Pleasure Seeker (oo er missus), LM had Merry Maker (similar reaction). But these days they just don't have the spare stock lying around to do this stuff. And of course if your rolling stock is on a train service provision leasing deal you'll get hammered in the contract for the extra mileage.

 

[TreacleMiller]

Chronicle Live has announced that there will be additional 2 trains running from Newcastle to London Kings Cross via LNER.

I have done some hypothetical figures...

RE Cup Final 21.30 - LXC to Newcastle (£140.30) - two five coach trains with 604 seats

If we say 70% of seats are full and paid for by Single standard Adult fare - create the 70% as the main money earner

(no railcards / concessions/ child etc

(they are factored into the remaining 30% plus empty seats )

The figures are staggering....

604seats /100 x 70 (to create 70%) × £140.30= £59,318

Does it really cost £60k to run a train from say London to Newcastle?

My thoughts is what is the true cost of running a train on the ECML ? if open access operators can run trains in general cheaper ...How?

For context, the staff costs for that service will be Sub £1k by quite a way.

Track access costs, mileage cost on the lease from Hitachi are the real costs.

Then energy..

 

[Jan Mayen]

At the risk of massive over-simplification, let's have a look at industry data for 22/23. Industry costs £25 Bn, train km 460 million, so cost/train km average £54 or so. But of course this hides massive differences between long IC sets and 2-car local DMU services. And the point has already been made about whether we include fixed costs. Anyone remember back in the 70s when BR ran weekend leisure trains using spare sets, cheap as chips ? On Southern we had Pleasure Seeker (oo er missus), LM had Merry Maker (similar reaction). But these days they just don't have the spare stock lying around to do this stuff. And of course if your rolling stock is on a train service provision leasing deal you'll get hammered in the contract for the extra mileage.

Anyone know what the passenger KM figure was for 22/23? Just wondering how much it costs on average to transport 1 passenger 1 km. Obviously, there will be very wide variations, but just wondered what the average was.