HS2 - The Shambles Express

For decades one of the goals that those in charge of marketing Britain overseas as a tourism destination have striven for is to entice more international visitors to travel beyond London.

In 1994 the share of inbound visits that included an overnight stay somewhere in the UK that was accounted for by London stood at 54%. In the twelve months to September 2023 (the most up-to-date figures currently available) London’s share of inbound visits with an overnight stay stood at, wait for it…, 54%.

There are lots of very good reasons why so many international visitors are keen to spend time embracing all that London has to offer, but that means they miss out on aspects of Britain’s culture, heritage and landscape that would provide a more in-depth experience.

Data from VisitBritain based on a question added to the International Passenger Survey back in 2018 suggests that 23% of international visitors used a train to travel outside of a town or city during their visit, ranging from 14% for Business visits to 43% for Study visits. One reason that inbound visitors opt to travel by rail rather than hire a car is that we drive on the left, whereas most of the rest of the world drives on the right.

It has also been found that many visitors have comparatively weak knowledge about the geography of Britain (that may hold true for many Brits too of course), leading to misperceptions about the distance between places and therefore the amount of valuable holiday time that would be gobbled up by travelling around the country.

Another barrier to exploring Britain by train for overseas visitors can be cost; Britain does not score highly when it comes to perceptions regarding value for money, and while overseas residents who are in the know can purchase a BritRail pass before they arrive in the UK giving unlimited travel for the chosen number of days, most visitors will be unaware of its existence.

For those who are simply going on a day trip there’s every chance they’ll be purchasing their ticket on the day of travel. If someone staying in London is heading to Bath for the day the cost of a return ticket (if they’re departing after 0930) will be ￡95.40, whereas booking specific trains a few weeks in advance would enable a saving of at least ￡20 and perhaps as much as ￡40.

So high time I got on to the topic of HS2 which did after all feature in the title of this month’s blog.

Much of Britain’s rail network is clogged up, meaning that as soon as a piece of infrastructure or rolling stock fails, trains, their crews and crucially their passengers all get delayed. One undesirable solution would be to hike train fares to such an extent that demand would evaporate and there’d be less need for so many trains trundling around the network, clearly not an optimal solution given net zero targets, as DfT analysis suggests that direct and indirect greenhouse gas emissions for a passenger journey from London to Glasgow are three times greater by petrol or diesel car than by train, and if the journey is by plane it would generate twice the emissions of that by petrol or diesel car.

The other option for tackling congestion on the rail network is to grow capacity. That’s in theory where HS2 could have been a gamechanger for Britain’s infrastructure, with the original idea (back in 2010) of shiny high speed trains whisking folks between central London, Birmingham, Manchester and Leeds.

In this sorry saga things often change, so perhaps one day commonsense will prevail, but as things stand HS2 is set to open in the early 2030s, but only between central Birmingham and Old Oak Common in west London. There (for now at least) remains a commitment for trains to eventually reach Euston in central London by 2035, but no longer is there a plan for a dedicated railway upon which the trains will run north of the West Midlands to either Manchester or Leeds.

Someone has probably already written a book on why this is shortsighted, but I’ll try to be brief.

The basic prerequisites for a high-speed railway to be viable have long been known, with the International Railway Journal noting that “the corridor must serve a large and dense population base as this provides for an attractive train frequency which will generate the revenue to justify the investment. High-speed rail is most competitive with road and air between 500 and 800km as this is where the highest elasticities of demand are observed.”

Another useful piece of information to keep in mind is that the costs of operating modern purpose-built trains are lowest at design speeds of between 250km/h and 300km/h.

Contrast these insights regarding optimal network lengths and train speeds with the present situation; London to Birmingham is a mere 200km, had the railway continued on to Manchester it would span about 330km, and in an imaginary world in which a dedicated line ran from London to Edinburgh this would represent a journey of 650km. Curtailing HS2 at Birmingham will leave it destined to remain uncompetitive versus car travel for those heading to the North of England or Scotland.

Next when we think about train speeds (which largely determine the cost of constructing and maintaining the infrastructure upon which they will operate) we discover that those specifying requirements for HS2 plumped for the “go as fast as is possible” choice as opposed to the “go at a speed that makes the most economic sense” choice, with HS2 being designed for trains that run at up to 360km/h.

Having abandoned the idea of building a dedicated railway north of Birmingham the government has said that these lovely new trains will still reach the North of England by travelling over existing lines. The current infrastructure in question can accommodate trains running at up a smidge over 200km/h, meaning that for much of their operational lives the new trains will pootle along at a speed some 160km/h below their capability.

Going really quickly makes most sense when you are travelling a substantial distance, as opposed to from London(ish) to Birmingham, and when you are serving customers willing to fork out a lot of dosh for the privilege of being whisked along at 360km/h because they are desperate to get from A to B as swiftly as possible.

However, the advent of vast numbers of people working from home and the rapid adoption of Zoom or Teams for business meetings has fundamentally changed the revenue per passenger journey opportunity on offer to HS2.

Less business travel means fewer passengers willing to pay for a fully flexible, and therefore, more expensive ticket. Those travelling for leisure are more interested in getting good value for money than shaving ten minutes off their journey time.

The next siding into which our journey must shunt takes us back to the issue of capacity, which is what HS2 was supposed to create lots more of. But if the dedicated HS2 trains are having to utilise the legacy network for journeys north of Birmingham there won’t be a net improvement in the number of trains able to shuttle back and forth between the Midlands and North of England.

The reality is even worse than there being no uptick in capacity. Each HS2 train will have roughly 550 seats and be 200m long, and had the trains been operating on their own track all the way to Manchester and Leeds, two sets could be coupled together creating a lengthy 400m rake of swish carriages hurtling along with more than one thousand passengers on board, with the ensemble able to snugly fit platforms at the newly constructed stations. Currently Pendolino trains operate on the West Coast Main Line between Euston, Birmingham, North West England and Glasgow, with these units being composed of up to 11 cars able to accommodate 607 passengers and with a total length of 265m.

The astute reader will have spotted that the current trains are 135m shorter than a pair of HS2 trains coupled together, which is a bit of a problem as most existing stations are unable to accommodate 400m trains unless the doors on several carriages were kept locked shut or platforms extended. The latter option might sound quite easy, but often that’s not the case without major redesign of the track and signalling layout.

In short, if current expectations for how HS2 trains will operate in the mid 2030s come to fruition single units will be deployed north of Birmingham, meaning that there will be around sixty fewer seats per train than is the case today, representing what would surely be an unparallelled example of investing large sums of money to knowingly make something worse.

There are plenty of examples from overseas demonstrating that it is possible to construct a modern high-speed railway without all the drama and mind-changing, whether that’s in France, Spain, Germany or Italy, and even in the automotive-loving US a dedicated railway linking Houston with Dallas (a distance of 390km) in just 90 minutes is being developed.

HS2 has undoubtedly suffered from chronic over-specification, poor project and financial oversight, fluctuating levels of political backing and a dose of misfortune courtesy of the pandemic changing travel behaviours.

There is perhaps one flickering light at the end of the tunnel, the mayors of Greater Manchester and West Midlands recently set out options short of calling for the now ditched segment of high-speed line north of Birmingham to be reinstated in its original guise.

One option called for the government not to press ahead with plans to sell off land which it had previously purchased along the corridor of the proposed railway. The mayors suggested that building a new line, but one which would see trains operate at a more traditional maximum speed, and therefore be far cheaper and quicker to construct, be considered, thereby creating the much-needed additional capacity.

I started this blog by noting that in the past thirty years there had been no change in the proportion of inbound visitors who venture beyond London. I reckon that it is safe to say that HS2 as currently envisaged is not going to help shift that particular dial.