Beleben’s post, “HS2 and construction inflation”, dated 22nd May 2014 provides the cost of the Great Central Line, built at the end of the 19th C, as £11.5 million for 153 route-km yielding £75,000 per km. A multiplier of 110 converts to current prices, providing £8.25 million per km. In comparison HS2 to Leeds and Manchester would provide 531 route-km at a cost of £42.6 billion, equivalent to £80 million per route-km; nearly ten times that of the GCL.

We go on to point out that the cost of a dual three-lane motorway is circa £20 million per km or £3.3 million per lane-km. That is 12 times less than HS2’s £40 million per track-km. Meanwhile a single motorway lane dedicated to 75-seat express coaches has four times the capacity of HS2′s supposed eighteen 1,000-seat trains per hour…….

Of course an urban motorway would cost more than the value cited above, but the way to create such facilities at a fraction of the cost of new construction is to pave the railways and to manage the resultant network to avoid congestion. Estimates based on actual conversions, available in Facts Sheet 12 of the Transport-Watch web site, suggest a conversion cost of circa £500,000 per lane or track-km or circa one sixth of new motorway construction costs.

“Do not be silly”, I hear you say, “How would London’s rail commuters get there if the railway were converted to a road”?

Well, in central London, and at peak times, the replacement express coaches would occupy only one seventh of the capacity available if the railway were paved, see topic 15 at http://www.Transport-Watch.co.uk where there is a map and some pictures to enjoy. Alternatively peg through the following and miss the map and pictures.

250,000 crushed surface rail passengers enter the centre of London in the morning peak hour. There are at least 25 pairs of tracks. Hence we have 10,000 passengers per inbound track. The 10,000 would all find seats in 150 75-seat coaches, sufficient to occupy one seventh of the capacity of one lane of a motor road the same width as required by a train. (1, 000 coaches per hour at a speed of 100 kph would have average headways of 100 metres).

Furthermore, for all but the longest journeys the express coach would match rail for journey time, while costing perhaps four times less and using a fraction of the fuel. Additionally countless lorries and other vehicles would transfer from the unsuitable rural roads and city streets which they now clog and the endless acres of nearly derelict railway land which abuts so many of our stations would become intensely valuable.

Baroness Kramer, Minister of State for Transport, gave the key note speech on 20^th May at the Infrarail exhibition held at Earls Court Exhibition Centre over the three days ending to 22nd. I asked the second question, as follows:

(1)   It was jolly good that HS2 would generate 100,000 jobs but the cost would amount to a fantastic £500,000 per job. How many would that vast subsidy destroy in that part of the economy which makes a profit?

(2)   Did the Baroness know that it cost the government seven times as much to move a passenger or tonne of freight by rail as it does by road?

(3)   Did she understand that the product of that vast expenditure provides only 3% of passenger journeys, 7.5% of passenger-miles and 8.5% of tonne-miles?

The Baroness replied by saying she did not recognise the railway I described, which is a pity because that is how it is.

The assembled multitude cheered, but I was congratulated privately.

Perhaps the problem is that, in the words of Upton Sinclair, “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it”.

Paul Withrington

Some of us are speculating whether an action for fraud could be mounted against those who have so shamelessly promoted HS2 by way of pretenses to the “transformational”, to the Wider Economic Benefits, and within the economic case generally, see the rest of this blog and Topic 17 within the Transport-Watch web site to appreciate the mammoth scale of the deceptions.

Paul Withrington

Dear Sir David

This letter raises seemingly small technicalities.  However, these are straws in the wind which point to a far greater issue.

In response to a FoI request your staff claimed that the organisation does not know the split between business, commuting and other trips.  However, that must be dissembling since, without that fundamental data, it would be impossible to carry out the economic analysis.

In lieu of an answer, data in Table 3-4 of the Assumptions report of October (PFM v4.3).  2013 enabled us to make a fairly robust estimate of business trips as a proportion of all trips. .The calculation yields 53.4%, a value which is far above the “one third” cited in paragraph 5.2.13 of the Demand and Appraisal report dated April 2012.

This very substantial and sudden increase arose immediately after the reduction in the value of business time from circa £47 per hour to £32 per hour and the reduction in forecast passengers from 380,000 per day to 310,000.  These changes should have reduced the benefits by 35%, so destroying the economic case.  However, largely as a result of this huge increase in the highly valued business trips the computed benefits increased by 24% – for Heavens sake

Separately from that, here is a particular example of how the railway and HS2 lobbies routinely behave.

• Bombardier told the Transport Committee’s inquiry into the Future of Rail, 2003-04, that to move 50,000 people per hour in one direction “we need a 35 metre wide road used by buses or a 9 metre wide track bed for a metro or commuter railway”.          In contrast ,the reality is that one lane of a motor road can carry 1,000 75-seat express coaches per hour at 100 kph thereby offering 75,000 seats in one lane the same width as required by a train.

This disgraceful anecdote is mirrored by the recent claim, made by the DfT, that HS2 will have the same capacity as a 12-lane motorway when, in reality, a single express coach lane would offer nearly four times as many seats as would HS2’s eighteen 1,100-seat trains per hour.

Frankly, the analysis and selling of this scheme is now (and always has been) dishonest: a desperately serious matter since tens, if not hundreds, of billions of pounds are at stake.

Stewart Joy, Chief Economist to British Railways in the late 1960’s wrote, in his book, ‘The Train that Ran Away’, that there are those who “… were prepared, cynically, to accept the rewards of high office in the British Transport Commission and the railways in return for the unpalatable task of tricking the Government on a mammoth scale.  Those men”, Joy wrote, “were either fools or knaves”; a sentiment which seems to apply with even greater force today than it did in the past.

Against that background, and the attached, I am canvassing people of status (particularly those who work in the railways) to act as whistle-blowers.

Perhaps you would consider that a preferable course to leaving a smear in the pages of history – the waste of tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of working men’s lives.

Yours sincerely

Paul F Withrington

Note, the letter sent to Sir David contained a tabulation and an attachment. To view those click here