What are the real costs of HS2 and the alternatives?

According to the statement in Parliament the "high speed" cost of the new line will be £1.2bn. This sounds like a case of massaging statistics and implausible.

First, the HST needs an entirely new route to accommodate the higher speeds. A conventional speed railway can be laid on unused route from Calvert to Rugby and from Old Oak Common to Northolt Junction. The railway remains operational all the way from Calvert to Marylebone, forming part of the Chiltern line commuter route to Aylesbury. Going towards London there is a connection to the GW main line south of Calvert, and another to the Oxford to Bletchley.

Second, the rolling stock costs for high speed are about double, and three times as much in the case of the special UK gauge rolling stock that will have to be used for running on both old and new lines.

Third, the energy costs are double, and they can only rise as time goes on.

Fourth, there is all that tunneling.

We could get all the extra capacity you wanted by building the GC back to Rugby, putting in a connection to the WCML, reinstating the Ashendon Junction to Grendon Underwood Junction link, restoring Northolt Junction to Paddington, electrifying Marylebone/Paddington/Oxford to Birmingham and putting all the Heathrow Express trains underground as part of the Crossrail scheme.

That would cost less than half of HS2.

All fur coat and no knickers

The government is expected to give the go-ahead to HS2 today. It is a shocking demonstration of the inability of Britain's decision makers to join up their thinking.

Having decided to invest £32 billion in public transport, it can not possibly be the best use of resources to devote it to this one project.

"Fur coat and no knickers" is the phrase that comes to mind. It is unlikely that the opposition will succeed in overturning the project at this stage. When there are so many more worthwhile rail improvements urgently needed all over the country, I find it sad that prestige trumps utility yet again.

Decision imminent

A decision on HS2 is expected this week. Comments in the newspapers are almost entirely hostile. Some it comes from NIMBYs. Some comes from people who do not want to see public money spent on anything at all, if possible. But the serious arguments come from those who argue that if this amount of money is going to be spent on the railways, it a mistake to blow it all on this scheme.

Bombardier awarded Electrostar order

The good news for Derby is that Bombardier has been awarded an order for 130 new Electrostar carriages for Southern. But what a pity that the opportunity was not taken to give these trains the design changes that would have made them so much better.

It is not that they are bad trains but there is plenty of room for improvement. It is unfortunate that design deficiencies are perpetuated over and over again instead of being dealt with through a programme of progressive development. This seems to be a British failing. We let ourselves down by not being sufficiently critical. Indeed, criticism is seen as disloyal and those who do it are regarded as whingers. It does not help the country's industrial performance.

Mind the gap

At long last the hazard of station platform gaps has been brought to attention. There is an article on the subject here.

Some of the comments are amazingly complacent.

Advance train tickets cost more than you think

The hand of tickets I bought on Monday turned out to be money down the drain. Late on Monday evening I got a phone call from the people I was visiting to say their car had been run into and they could not see me because they would be spending the day trying to get it fixed and back on the road.

That is the trouble with advance tickets. Things can crop up to stop one making the journey. Which is why they are more expensive than they seem. People must realise this. So why do we have to put up with them?

Advance tickets are all about "Yield Management". Ideally, every train would have a full load of passengers for the whole length of its journey. Ideally, also, trains would run at regular intervals for 16 hours a day and every train would have the same number of carriages. But people prefer to travel when it suits them, and this gives rise to periods of peak demand. If the system is designed to carry peak traffic, then the trains will be more than half-empty for much of the time. Conversely, a system designed for off-peak traffic will be overcrowded at peak times.

Yield management is used to even out the traffic to match demand to supply. There is nothing new about the concept. From the earliest times, cheap excursion fares were offered, and at the weekends passengers travelled from the city to the seaside on commuter trains. On long-distance routes there were cheap mid-week tickets to tempt people to travel then rather than at the busy week-ends. At the busiest times of the year, seat reservations were compulsory for some trains. At the busiest times of the year, also, extra trains were run. If a particular train looked as if it was likely to be over-full, extra coaches could easily be added. Elderly trains were held in reserve for just this eventuality. At times, one was liable to travel in a train that belonged in a museum, but one could expect to get a seat, and sometimes a surprisingly comfortable though ancient one.

All this came to an end with the advent of fixed formation and multiple unit trains in the 1970s. These are so expensive that spare trains can not be held in reserve, and so complex, with so many cable connections between the vehicles, that extra carriages cannot easily be added. It can take several hours to remove a vehicle from some types of diesel multiple unit and and another half a day to put it back again and make sure everything is working properly.

Slower is faster
With the HS2 trains costing about twice as much as a conventional speed train, and the special trains for running on both HS2 and existing lines costing three times as much, the pressure on the operators to fill every seat at the maximum price will be even more acute. It is good economics but rotten service, and it adds to journey time because passengers have to turn up long before their train departs to be sure of not losing the journey they have paid for. From the passengers' point of view, a slower, regular interval walk-on service is faster!

In the long run, better technical solutions should be sought. The price of carriages needs to come down, and it should be made easier to add and remove vehicles, even if it means leaving off some of the frills we have become accustomed to such as computer points. Nevertheless, things could be improved. It is very expensive to keep all these booking systems up and running. It is not necessary to book every passenger into a particular seat on a particular train. The main need is to encourage people to travel off peak. It is not difficult to predict which trains are likely to be busy. Surely all that is needed is to have a relatively low standard fare and have all seats reservable on the busiest trains, with reservation fees set according to how popular the train was likely to be. And get rid of those bargain basement tickets which can turn out to be money down the drain.

Hand of tickets

Hand of tickets, originally uploaded by Henry░Law.

It took me the best part of half an hour to buy a ticket from Brighton to Nuneaton on the internet. Even then it was not what I wanted, as I would have preferred to go on the slower train and avoid changing at Rugby but that was more expensive, goodness knows why.

I was not able to print out my own ticket but had to go to the station and fetch it from a machine. This involved typing in a code on the touch screen keyboard, which is always awkward.

In the end, the machine spewed out ticket after ticket, and I finished up with these nine pieces of card. I will leave it to the ticket inspector to sort that lot out.