HS2 reset delayed further as costs mount and questions grow

The HS2 reset, promised by the then new chief executive Mark Wild...

The HS2 reset, promised by the then new chief executive Mark Wild in December 2024 for 2025 has still not emerged. Nor will it any time soon, now that Parliament is heading for recess which will be followed by a ‘purdah’ period during which politically sensitive material cannot be released - because of the local government elections.

With the reset still being worked on, the six monthly update we were given by Heidi Alexander just before Parliament went into the Easter recess unsurprisingly provided few answers to the pressing questions about Europe’s biggest infrastructure project. The key point Alexander wanted to get across was that the high speed line would not be quite as high speed. The trains will operate at a slower speed than the 360 kph for which the line was originally designed in order, she said, to save money.

This was a ridiculous bit of spin to disguise the fact that Wild’s reset will be at least half a year late, and quite possibly more. Sources tell me that much of the work on the reset is complete but that the ministers are reluctant to make any announcement because HS2 is, rightly, seen as a vote loser. While that is true because the project has become synonymous with government incompetence, that is really mostly the responsibility of Labour’s predecessors rather than the current government and cannier politicians than the current bunch should be able to frame it that way. Instead, there is raw terror about saying anything about HS2 which is, in itself, a scandal since £7bn of our money is being eaten up annually by the benighted project.

Making up nonsense stories about how slowing down the railway will save millions does not help. The truth, as others have pointed out, is that the project design is largely set in stone – or rather in concrete if we are talking about the ballast – and changing it will not cut much off the cost of the scheme at this stage. Using ballast may perhaps save a few bob but, as has been pointed out, it will lead to increased maintenance costs and the long term effect may in fact be negative.

On the other hand, I do take issue, though, with the suggestion by some of the ever smaller group of HS2 fans that slowing the speed will lead to greater costs because more rolling stock and drivers will be needed. The difference in timing will be so marginal that it will not require extra rolling stock and, in any case, there will be plenty of train paths available on the line between London and Birmingham until services start to run further north which is not going to happen any time soon. The problem with the rolling stock is, in fact, a whole different story as too many trains have been ordered and, if the story about slowing the services down is true, they will be overengineered and unnecessarily expensive.

Whatever the motivation and the spin, the decision to run at 300 kph is entirely sensible which is the norm for most high speed lines across the world. It will ensure greater operational resilience and reduce maintenance costs. Nevertheless, the decision has angered ministers who have therefore wrongly dressed it up as a way of saving money. In fact, I am told there is no confidence among the technical team that 360 kph can be achieved and, in any case, on a 135 mile long railway with several inclines, it would only be reachable for a few short bursts, shaving a couple of minutes off the journey time. It always was a pointless bit of showing off, designed by Andrew McNaughton the original chief engineer to the delight of Boris Johnson who loved the idea of having the best and most modern railway in the world, a boast which has cost the British public dear. And indeed, undermined the whole scheme.

The scale of the mess that is HS2 remains an embarrassment and, in many ways, a mystery. Even though the tunnel boring machines have started their journey from Old Oak Common to Euston, there is still no clear plan as to how the terminal will accommodate the high speed trains. For the moment, the scheme is still the Aston to Acton shuttle and seems destined to be just that when it eventually opens. Last autumn, I wrote in this column (Rail 1050) a rather angry piece about the fact that I had bumped into Keir Starmer, who happens to be the local MP, and how he had told me blandly it was ‘all in hand’. Well it certainly wasn’t then and it still isn’t now, though there do seem to be a few more hard hats around. There is, too, a permanent traffic jam on Hampstead Road which runs alongside the site, as for some reason there are still lane closures and big holes, two years after work stopped. Euston, as I wrote at the time, is the country’s biggest urban redevelopment scheme and yet it remains in limbo.

The one piece of hard news given in the statement by Alexander was that so far £46bn has been spent on the project. And you will all be pleased to know that the project has kept within its £7bn this year. At least one cheer for that. But there are still far more unknown unknowns. Alexander’s statement provided no information on when the scheme will be completed, what it will cost and what trains will run on the line. The final bill is anyone’s guess, though unlikely to be less than £100bn. The rolling stock surely must be redesigned with shorter trains than the 400m ones originally planned but again there is silence. And we await Wild’s reset to find out about the governance structure that was so heavily criticised in the Stewart review report published last year

I have previously been told that 2036 is the very earliest possible but again we have been kept in the dark.

What everyone craves is a bit of honesty. We all know HS2 is a terrible mess and is costing a fortune. But if it was seen that progress is being made and if ministers like Alexander were to set out the issues, it might make the whole thing less toxic. The best thing for ministers to do is get all the bad news over as quickly as possible and hopefully then progress can be made. Hiding their heads in the sand is not a viable strategy.

African adventure

My book, Fast Track, which tells the story of high speed railways across the world, is now due for publication on July 23. Details and hopefully an extract will appear soon in Rail, Meanwhile

I am off on my travels again to South Africa to research my next effort, which is on Cecil Rhodes’s vision of the Cape to Cairo railway. Of course, this was never completed though much of it was and I am going there to see how much of it is still in use.

My plan is to follow the track of most the railway that was built. Certain sections are out of reach as I do not want to risk my life in Sudan or the ironically named Democratic Republic of the Congo. However, I will be making a long journey up through southern Africa, starting at Cape Town, to Kimberley and, after a detour to Pretoria/Johannesburg through to Gaberone in Botswana, Bulawayo and Victoria Falls in Zimbabwe and then to Lusaka in Zambia.

There’s only one problem – I had hoped that there would be passenger trains for much of that journey but in fact the passenger rail service in South Africa, once the tenth largest network in the world, is all but defunct. I will be explaining why in my next column, giving the background to what is a terribly sad situation. Then joy of joys, if all goes well I will be taking one of the longest rail journeys in Africa – if not the longest – between Zambia and Tanzania on a line built by the Chinese half a century ago. Wish me luck and watch out for my despatches here and on Bluesky, which has replaced X as my social media platform.

Thanks for your support.