Bat tunnels, a northern leg cancelled by a Prime Minister while speaking in the city the newly cancelled leg was supposed to serve, £600m of land bought which will now not be needed for the railway, high speed trains which ministers have decided can’t run at high speed, endless delays, and an overall price tag of £100bn.
We all know by now the increasingly absurd ways HS2 has gone wrong. So rather than simply listing the numerous errors made by those who conceived and are building HS2, it is instructive to look at how other countries got it right.
Inevitably, this more positive story starts with Japan, which in 2024 celebrated the 60th anniversary of the world’s first high speed line running between Tokyo and Osaka. The creation of a new railway on tracks used only by high speed trains was a world first and would largely determine the characteristics of those that followed. There was, therefore, in cab signalling rather than external colour lights, essential for running at high speed, no level crossings and trains that were powered by several motors spread among the carriages rather than a single locomotive at the front.
However, crucially the key aspect the Japanese got right was not to create a totally different type of train, but rather to focus on improving existing technology to boost capacity on its overcrowded Tokyo-Osaka line. There was, deliberately, no blue sky thinking. Moreover, services started running at the rather modest speed of 200kph, not that much faster than fast expresses at the time, before it was ramped up gradually over the years to 300kph.
This was evolution rather than revolution. The French picked up the high speed baton a decade and a half later, with again the construction of a line that was designed to relieve congestion on its busiest railway, Paris-Lyon. Of course there was some innovation following a series of speed trials but essentially the trains were developments of older models rather than a completely new design. A cheap way of building a high speed line was deployed – essentially constructing first a solid road surface and then turning it into a railway.
There was rigid discipline over the construction phase of that first line, with just one significant variation to the original plan and no deviation from the construction timetable. The construction was completed on time and on budget.
The lesson from Spain, which now has Europe’s largest network, is a political one. The first line was built – again on time, though it greatly exceeded its original budget – to serve the Expo 1992 exhibition in Seville and was deemed an immediate success, to such an extent that the government immediately embarked on a national scheme to build a high speed network. This was seen as an emblematic programme to highlight Spain’s emergence from a backward dictatorship to a modern democracy.
Rather than counting every penny and subjecting each new railway to a lengthy process involving business cases and predictions of usage, the government, supported by all political parties, simply presented the scheme as a national project vital to the country’s future. By using standard construction methods and establishing model designs for stations and other features, costs were kept to a minimum. It is accepted that many lines serving sparsely populated areas will never be profitable by standard accounting measures, but they will be invaluable in holding a disparate nation together.
Other examples of successful schemes include Italy and several Asian nations such as Taiwan and South Korea. All have faced difficulties: opposition from local people, environmentalists, and economists has often been vocal and concerted. But by and large, governments have driven these projects through and have been rewarded with well used and popular services. Therefore it would be wrong to allow the supporters of HS2 to whinge about how it has been difficult to overcome opposition to schemes in the UK. Suffice to say that in no other country would the project’s leaders have allowed a 10-mile tunnel under modest hills like the Chilterns to be built, let alone spent £130m on a tunnel to possibly protect a few not so rare bats.
The world leader, by a distance, is of course China, where 30,000 miles of high speed rail have been built in under two decades. Of course, China is an authoritarian regime where the government is able to push through projects without democratic consent. But that is by no means the whole story.
The construction of a high speed railway requires a wide ranging set of skills from project management and efficient procurement, to adapting modern technology and engineering methods. None of that is dependent on the authoritarian nature of the government; it only requires standard skill sets found across the world.
In the UK, none of the positive characteristics seen in successful projects were displayed in the construction of HS2. There was no consensus across government of why HS2 was being built; there was no clear guiding mind or charismatic figure to push through the project economically and efficiently; there was no proper government oversight; and completely new technology was required because a higher speed than anywhere else was adopted as the norm.
Some of these lessons have now been learnt – but too late to save taxpayers billions of pounds.
Fast Track, Christian Wolmar’s new book on the story of high speed rail across the world, will be published by Penguin on 23 July
Part of the problem is an adversarial political system with disproportionate power to parties with a minority mandate in votes, privatisation & its removal of expertise from the state & strong bias for cars & planes.
Very high speed (>240kph) lines make little sense in an area as densely populated as Central England, with >700/km² (cf France ~125/km², Spain ~100/km²). *IF* extra rail capacity was needed, a 4-track conventional main line using tilting trains could have been built for a fraction of the cost of HS2 and provided much greater capacity.