Friday Reads – 22 November 2019

1. The “Carbon Brief” article chimes with one in December’s “Modern Railways” on the subject of cutting emissions … clearly an idea whose time has come.
   ( Except inside DfT of course )

2. On 19 Aug, 2019 you published a link to an IanVisits article about the first solar farm to power 3rd rail trains at Aldershot, Surrey. The latest edition of The Economist podcast Babbage episode Reality Check has an interview with Riding Sunbeams executive director Leo Murray, the person that had the idea to use solar farms, he thinks the next major step is to use a solar farm to power tube trains, he mentions the Central line and using solar farms to power trams and trolly trucks. The interview starts at 7 mins 30 secs:
   https://www.economist.com/podcasts/2019/11/20/reality-check-does-cybersickness-affect-women-more-than-men

   DC-DC connections has been dropped due to the lack of DC-DC inverters and the 5 year development time needed to develop new inverters, and battery storage has also been scrapped because of the costs https://www.railengineer.co.uk/2019/10/02/first-light-the-riding-sunbeams-trial-of-solar-powered-electric-traction/.

   And the second study Riding Sunbeams Before Dawn 2019 also mentions the same reasons why DC-DC and battery storage isn’t going to be used.

3. Why is ridership increasing in Paris but falling in London?

4. Ridership was strongly growing in London until just recently. The recent fall was a bit of a surprise and there isn’t an agreed and unambigious explanation for it. Our demand forecasting methods do not fully account for it. PDFH – the industry demand forecasting manual – was recently rewritten but the adjustments are only able to explain about half of the difference between the old forecast and recent demand. For some more hand-wavey proposed explanations you have articles like this.
   https://www.citymetric.com/transport/here-s-why-fewer-londoners-are-taking-tube-and-why-it-poses-threat-tfl-s-finances-3925
   https://thedeveloper.live/places/places/why-are-fewer-people-riding-the-underground-the-reason-is-not-what-you-think-
   Maybe whatever it is – lifestyle and social changes perhaps – will also arrive in Paris a bit later.

   The Carbon Brief article is all very well but unfortunately building railway infrastructure seems to cost about 2 or 3 times as much in Britain as most other places. So inevitably we just can’t afford to buy so much. Let’s just remember the Spanish built the 472km Madrid-Seville 300km/h high speed line for €3bn, thought utterly spendthrift at the time. And when in autumn 2018 France announced 5 more high speed lines, the budget allocated was €13.4bn. https://www.thelocal.fr/20180912/french-government-gives-green-light-to-five-new-high-speed-tgv-lines I’ll leave someone else to work out how many track-km that is in comparison to HS2, but my suspicion is that even if it over-runs by 100%, it will still look like small change in comparison to the cost of HS2.

5. @Ivan – This weeks RAIL magazine has a commentary on some of the procurement issues causing HS2’s high costs. For example, the government want to offload the risk of infrastructure failures to the construction companies, wanting them to guarantee the structures will be safe for 30 years. This means structures have to be over-engineered and embankments end up as little more than backfilled viaducts. This sort of thing make it very difficult to do a meanginful comparison of costs with other projects.

6. @Jimbo – how interesting – the government has clearly been taking French lessons – pretty much the same deal was offered to contractors bidding to construct and maintain the LGV Atlantique. The deal was accompanied by some flying pig response times for contractors to rectify any infrastructure failures in service. Since the French were unable/unwilling to disclose any failure rates for existing infrastructure, it was easy, even for native French contractors (Eiffage in the case that I was advising on), to give the French government the finger. HS2 Ltd should expect similar responses; as you say, people will have to be bribed with very large sums.

7. Thanks for that example, I’ll add it to my list. Though I came across that particular trap (in the generic sense – pass on certain risks and they’ll overspec the job) many years ago. I had thought the rail industry long understood it and how not to fall into it. So that one, if now recognised again, should be relatively easy to fix.

   But there are many reasons, in conventional as well as HS rail, and they all add up. I don’t think anyone has ever been able to find reasons enough to account for the total size of the cost difference. So many things, many now deeply ingrained, have to change to get back to somewhere sensible.

8. IVAN, I don’t have the international experience of ngh and Graham H, but I get the impression that when the French talk about public-private partnerships, the state still has fingers in many other risk pies, not just engineering ones. If one looks at the financing, state provision or guarantees to “private” builders seems to be a “thing”

9. @130 – very much so. The contractor you encounter is part financed by two banks, both of which turn out to be owned at one remove by the French state. Same with operators. The interesting question is – at least to those of us brought up on UK public finance standards – how the French have managed to keep the whole flying circus aloft for the last half century. France as the ultimate – and highly successful – ponzi scheme?

10. I suggest that it would be more valid to compare the proposed cost of building HS2 with the cost of high-speed construction in Germany, rather than France or Spain. Much lower population density means that French and Spanish lines run to a large extent through largely empty countryside. In contrast, conditions in Germany are more like the UK and particularly stringent environmental and ecological conditions may apply.

11. @ Londoner in Scotland
    Even Germany has a lower population density than England, and the lowest density areas in the UK tend to be at the perimeter of the country (Scotland north of the Central belt and mid/west Wales) whereas the perimeters of Germany include major cities such as Munich, Basel and Hamburg, so a straight national density to density comparison is a bit misleading.

    Population density increases costs for two reasons. One is that it just puts up the cost of land. The other is that acceptable routes are harder to find and mitigation measures, such as tunnels, are much more widely needed and these put up costs in their own right.

    It may not be the whole answer as to why new rail line costs in the UK are so expensive in comparison, but it’s almost certainly one of the major reasons (if not the most important).

12. It’s like being an alcoholic. Until we are willing to admit that there is a really big construction cost problem here, then we aren’t going to find it and address it. It’s not just railways either. In Europe, there are only 3 countries where road construction/maintenance costs more than in Britain, and those are Norway, Switzerland and Austria, who kind of have a reasonable excuse, as well as being very high labour cost countries. British dwellings are small and low quality for what the same construction cost would get you in other places. But it is in railways where the sheer magnitude of the cost difference is so extraordinary that it really ought to make us wake up and smell the smell.

    The 125km of HSL-Zuid in the Netherlands was €8bn so population density doesn’t wash as the main reason. HS2’s land costs are something like £3bn, which is a lot in comparison to a European line, but small change in HS2’s costs, so it doesn’t explain very much. You can look at projects like Oxford-Bicester and the cancelled Metropolitan Line Extension (cancelled because its cost projection had got beyond beyond) which were mostly on existing alignment, so there was no material land issue or route-finding issue, and still they are very expensive. I discussed the cost of British station projects with Dutch railway station people recently, and you could see they were staggered by the cost of the British projects for just simple local new stations.

    And as for poor land conditions (recently used an HS2 excuse), well a lot of the Netherlands isn’t much better than chicken soup as a building substrate. A lot of railway there runs on a low continous viaduct, and has very many bridges. And I think a lot of HSL-Zuid was slab track. So they have their own distinctive difficulties even in mostly flat landscape. More generally, I don’t believe diverse and unexpected ground is a special British issue.

    Yes in Britain we can have a lot of tunnelling on new schemes, just to keep it out of people’s faces. There used to be a benchmarking study on the HS2 website, which did adjust for tunelling, and was still pretty damning. I can’t find that any more, but here’s a newer one, and it does split out HS tunnelling costs. The basic observation is that benchmark costs are (in 2011 prices) £3.2bn per 100km, though the range is wide. And these are delivered costs, not prior estimates. They then study different costs of different features, HS2 having various expensive features (perhaps we should try harder to avoid expensive features). At a glance they seem to come up with HS2, at the 2016 cost estimate, being about 27% too much. But it has gone up, not down, since then. https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/755650/high-speed-rail-international-benchmarking-study.PDF

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