I am currently about halfway through writing my book on high speed rail across the world. I had originally put forward a proposition for a book on the HS2 debacle in the UK but publishers mostly rejected the idea and fortunately Penguin came up with a better suggestion, one that incorporates both good and bad stories.
HS2 is, however, far worse than ‘bad’. It is difficult, indeed, to find an appropriate adjective. Disastrous, catastrophic, calamitous are all possible suggestions but they do not go far enough. The bald picture of what has happened to the project since its inception in 2009 is just unbelievable. Conceived as a line linking London with Leeds, Manchester and Birmigham, and possibly Heathrow at a cost of around £35bn to be completed by 2030, now the cost is set to be at least £100bn for a much truncated line. Rather than linking all those cities, it will now run between Old Oak Common, five miles from central London to Birmingham and a link with the West Coast Main line a few miles further north. Gone is the idea that this will sever the north, that it will level up parts of the country and that
This is really quite an astonishing failure and I have just spent an hour interviewing Sally Gimson who has written a superb book on the debacle, Off the Rails, the inside story of HS2 to be published at the end of the month. She argues that the project was flawed from the start, as it had no clear aim and its route was determined far too early. She identifies other failings such as the rush to get the legislation through before a clear detailed route had been established. Astonishingly, only around 4 per cent of the route had been precisely identified when the Bill to build the line was passed. Worse, the contracts signed in haste to build the line are on a ‘cost plus’ basis. In other words, the contractors can charge pretty much what they want, and then add a profit margin. No wonder the budget has soared. There is plenty more on the Calling All Stations podcast which will be published also at the end of the month.
As my book will recount, there have been successful high speed projects in numerous countries across the world, starting with Japan and France, but now encompassing more than 20 nations. Of course there has been the odd failure, and cost overruns are frequent, but along with the UK, the country with the worst record is the United States. It too has its own megaproject disaster, the California High Speed Project which has just suffered a major cut in funding from the Trump administration.
The California project has suffered from many of the same faults as HS2. It was started without a clear vision as to how it would be completed, it has been subjected to all sorts of changes because of political decisions and its funding has always been uncertain. Work has only started on a segment in the south between Bakersfield and Merced in the Central Valley with the hope that services will start running by 2033 but this small 170 mile section will generate little revenue given that it will serve neither of the state’s two main cities, San Francisco and Los Angeles. Estimates to complete the whole line have reached $130 billion but with the Trump administration actively hostile to the scheme, it is unclear whether it will ever be completed. This is in sharp contrast to HS2 in the UK which has a guaranteed £7bn for each of the next four years and is expected to be completed, at least between London and Birmingham though the opening date has been pushed back to at least until 2036 and probably 2039. It would be quite funny, if it were not such a terrible indictment on the UK’s inability to manage what is basically a simple project – to build a railway.