If you fill all the seats on the train the HS2 breakeven operating cost per seat will be about £10 for Euston - Manchester, anything above that will help repay infrastructure construction costs.There's two keep points, rail has already been having an impact on the number of air passengers, with flights between Manchester and London being significantly reduced since the upgrade to the WCML.
The second point is that the cost per seat of HS2 is likely to much reduced compared to existing trains, allowing ticket prices to be lower.
As an example the TOC' costs are broadly 1/3 train leasing, 1/3 staff costs and 1/3 other costs. If we look at the number of coaches needed to run the London to Manchester trains these are a mixture of 9+11 coach trains. Even on 9+9+11 coach trains each hour (however it's likely to be a few more 11 coach trains than this allows for due to the mix of the fleet) where it takes two hours each way with a half turn around at each end (5 hour round trip time) this needs 145 coaches.
Now with HS2 you need more coaches per train to get 400m long trains. If we assume 25m coaches that's 16 coaches. With no journey time savings that would clearly mean that you'd need more coaches to run the same service. However that's not the case with HS2 is it?
London to Manchester will be reduced to 1 hour each way with a half hour turn around at each end that gives us a round trip time of 3 hours, that then requires 144 coaches.
As such you've got a much larger train with many more seats for broadly the same cost as you have currently for the existing trains.
That then means that 1/3 of the costs haven't increased even though the number of seats on a train have doubled (9 coach 390 had 469 seats and a 11 coach 390 had 589 seats, that totals 1,048 Vs the expected 1,100 on a HS2 train).
Now if we look at the staff costs then for drivers they currently take 5 hours to do the round trip, with HS2 that falls to 3 hours, that means that each driver can run more services, this then reduces your staff costs.
Likewise guards and whilst you may wish to have more catering staff due to the size of the trains these would be mostly paid for by sales. As such you're staff costs are going to be lower than they currently are. However again that would be for trains with double the capacity.
Faster journey times and more mile per train per day have a big effect on the economics.
Revenue maximisation techniques with ticketing look very different when you have that much capacity!
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