That won't save very much, because you will still need to rebuild all the stations to get the trains in.
The real solution is to fix project management and also dump the insane plans that have trains staying in Euston for 55 minutes on turnaround.
Some trains will spend as long turning around as they spend rolling!
Indeed, there should be no need to spend so long turning around, 25 minutes should be more than doable.
Where will the subsidies for that come from?
Freight trains are some of the most heavily subsidised services on the network, they pay essentially nothing in track access fees. They are even worse than commuter trains in tht aregard.
The whole point is that the long passenger trains need the least subsidy, as you can get 600+ passengers to one driver. If we assume a £120,000 a year per driver running trains in service (including pay, pension, training, and pretty much any other cost you could apply to the driver) then if they work 100 days a year and run one return service a day of 600 seats (so all these numbers are setting the value per seat very high) the cost per seat for that driver is £2. Even on a service which is 40% loaded that's £5.
Run the maths at 1,100 seats and it falls to £2.73 for a 40% loaded service. However change that to a 120 seat train and the cost rises to £25 per seat for a 40% loaded service - even if you could ensure 100% loading it's still £10 per seat.
That's why Northern with loads of short trains requires a shed load of subsidy, whilst SWR didn't used to.
It's one of the reasons for the need for NPR (and arguably the Northern elements of HS2 - especially the extra platform capacity) is so critical, as if you could lengthen a lot of extra services by freeing up long distance (including TPE and XC) from the existing platforms you create a LOT of spare capacity for longer local services.
5% of the overrun that they will current admit to at Euston.
That's not the same thing given the station hasn't really started being built yet!
The problem is not so much that the station has overrun, it is that the overrun has grown so large, so fast.
That paints a picture which leans towards a runaway cost increase and undermines belief in the viability of the existing design.
There is little reason to believe that the last set of cost estimates is accurate.
The problem is we also don't know if they aren't accurate.
Is this a repeat of Crossrail, where things kept getting hidden, or are these extra costs the industry learning from that and so displaying the increased costs much earlier (which also may include substantial contingency values).
Yes, management of this project has been substandard since it was first proposed in 2009.
Across multiple governments.
Well it is likely that very little contingency has actually been spent at the Euston site, since the station is nowhere near close to completion
All that happened is the projected price has exploded.
I'm not sure exactly how the accounting works, but projected overspend and actual overspend are two different things.
Indeed, however the point I was making was they are still within the contingency value, even though the costs for one element has doubled.
If I was extending a house and the cost of the kitchen doubled from £15,000 to £30,000 (as I'd ripped the old kitchen or and realised that there was extra work I needed to do, like relay the floor, replaster the walls, etc.) and if I'd allowed £40,000 for extra costs, with £10,000 of that budgeted overspend already been needed (in part as the cost of materials had gone up faster than inflation) then I wouldn't be overly concerned. The kitchen was always going to be the areas where things were likely to go over. Yes the kitchen could get more costly - as the installation hasn't started - but a lot more of the unknown is now known.
Do we know they make matters worse?
The projected Euston price is now greater than the previous projected price, but to make that judgement would require us to assume the previous projected price was even slightly accurate.
We don't need to know if the previous estimate was accurate or not. All we need to know is how likely it is that the new estimate will increase.
For example I could have been widely optimistic (delusional even) on the first estimate and said that it was going to cost £1,000 for my kitchen project. If however the update has allowed for a much better cost estimate as well as a reasonably high spec set of appliances and some contingency as well, then that £30,000 value may well be able to be deliver the project for that amount without the costs rising further or only needing to hold off on the purchase of the coffee machine until later in the project when my pay allows me to cover those costs without needing more mortgage.
As such it's a car of, have we learnt from Crossrail and these are reasonably accurate cost estimates and the project is unlikely to go over by much more than had now been allowed for, or are we in Crossrail territory and there's going to be another £20bn of costs to be added?
As I indicated before, HS2 was always going to find it hard to justify one element seeing significant overspend (even if overall the value wasn't too bad), due to the vocal opposition that it's faced.
The fact that even with a near doubling of Euston and we're at peak construction along the line and we've got this far with still 25% of the budgeted overspend in place, could still mean that the project is completed without costs getting too far out of control (as they extra for Euston could not increase further, or even any extra increase could be limited).
If you read the headlines, you could easily get the impression that we're at a point where HS2 has already gone significantly over budget. Which unless there's something other than "this is a repeat of Crossrail" when we don't know if it is or not, then how "out of control" is spending?
What I've manned to find, not all that bad (in that we're within the budget still), even if phase 1 goes over by £4bn (or about 10% of the budget) it wouldn't be ideal, however it also wouldn't be "out of control". It would also be within the realms of extra passenger numbers could still justify the extra cost (especially if those extra passengers were to start using the service fairly early).
For example HS2 was based on 170 (2030) passengers for every 100 (2009) passengers. If we see that actually be 200 in 2032 (assuming that's the opening date; which would require passenger numbers to be 17.5% higher than 2019) and it rise at 3% per year to 238 in 2038 (the year rail growth should have only reached 200) then a 10% overspend would be a thing of the past and given the success of the passenger numbers of little concern.
Whilst 3% per year is higher than the growth model, it's also not an unachievable rate of growth for a railway which would deliver a lot of extra long distance rail capacity.
I'm not asking should we be optimistic about if there's future costs which we don't know about. I'm asking do we know if these costs are a reasonable figure which is unlikely to change in the future. As if it's reasonable and there's a high probability that is the final cost, then the scheme isn't "out of control". However if it isn't (and we've not learnt anything from Crossrail) then that's a very different story.
It's very easy to find articles on HS2 by people who have been against HS2 for years and assume the worse, as it fits their narrative. It's much harder to know for sure what's going on. What I do know is that currently costs (a mixture of spend too date and projected cost increases for Euston) are still within budget with some contingency spare for a few more elements to cost more before we even start to go over budget.
