Government to cut £1bn from rail budget

[APOLLO]

BBC News

 

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-55182000

 

I'm a supporter of HS2, all of it but London - Birmingham is underway now so I reckon will go on. The two legs may get canned / modified - we will see. this Covid crisis really has put the brakes on our railways. Required capacity going forward is anyone's guess.

 

Ah well, we got our nice new depot at Springs Branch along with lots of shiny new trains - all we want now is passengers ! - I've not been on a train since January, just before I renewed my senior railcard. What an investment (in Tesco vouchers) that was - NOT !!!!

 

Brit15

[Legend]

I do wonder what demand for train travel will be like after this . Covid has caused seismic change in patterns and I don't think these will return to pre covid levels . For a start a great many of us are working from home , so commuting will be down . Season ticket sales got to be down if folk staying at home for at least a proportion of week.  Leisure travel affected as our town and city centers decimated by retail folding (Debenhams , Arcadia). 

 

Will people still be as happy to get on trains , if say mask wearing becomes the norm , even after vaccinations or prefer the "bubble" that is their car 

 

Could it be that there is now over capacity in our railway network that is not just temporary but likely to last a number of years . 

 

I think the "reset" button got pressed in February on a number of things , some of which is not yet apparent . 

 

 

[Pete the Elaner]

Is this a real cut or a politician's trick - ie. increase the budget by 2 billion then cut 1 billion from it.

That way they can claim the budget has been increased by 1 billion & also cut it by 1 billion, depending on what they wish to report or disprove.

Confused? That's the whole point.

[Guy Rixon]

There's a suggestion that the cuts reflect infrastructure work that cannot be completed this year or next year because of the pandemic. If the money were being deferred because it cannot be spent quickly, that would be reasonable. But that's not how public-sector budgets work; if it's gone now, it doesn't come back later. So we --- electorate --- need to extract some kind of government promise that investment will return when it can be used.

[caradoc]

1 hour ago, Legend said:

I do wonder what demand for train travel will be like after this . Covid has caused seismic change in patterns and I don't think these will return to pre covid levels . For a start a great many of us are working from home , so commuting will be down . Season ticket sales got to be down if folk staying at home for at least a proportion of week.

 

Valid points, but of course we do not know what proportion of home workers will return to the office once the pandemic is over and something near normality has returned. I can only say that, having dealt with various financial institutions post-lockdown(s), I have found home working far less efficient and user-friendly than before, and given the choice I will place my trust, and therefore business, with companies using office-based staff instead of someone on a mobile phone in their spare bedroom.

 

If commuting does not return to anywhere near pre-Covid levels, that will actually benefit the railways in not having to provide the (huge, in London particularly) excess resources only required to cope with peak traffic for a couple of hours five days a week. And people working from home will have more time, and money, to spend on leisure pursuits instead of commuting; Some of that might be spent on rail travel for pleasure rather than pain ! 

 

[Innerhome]

The BBC article mentions the - in my view - silly slogan of "reversing the Beeching Cuts" for which the government allocated £500m. This will buy about 50 miles of fairly basic railway on former infrastructure. HS2 presses onwards - at least London - Birmingham - as this is a nice shiny new project for Boris - a bit like his idea of an Irish Sea tunnel Stranraer - Larne.  The basics of electrifying Manchester - Huddersfield (I think Huddersfield - Leeds may be going ahead ?) or finishing the Midland mainline - or Cardiff - Swansea just seemed to get missed. The worry has to be that the cuts affect improving the core network.

[Nearholmer]

34 minutes ago, caradoc said:

If commuting does not return to anywhere near pre-Covid levels, that will actually benefit the railways in not having to provide the (huge, in London particularly) excess resources only required to cope with peak traffic for a couple of hours five days a week.

 

Spot-on.

 

Many people completely overlook the inefficiencies imposed by very peak-biased commuting.

 

I also agree with those who say that it is hugely difficult to even guess how demand will 'pan out'. There must be huge pent-up demand for leisure travel and VFR, there certainly is in this household, but a significant proportion of potential travellers will feel nervous until vaccinated.

 

A young-person-led recovery of rail travel?

[Wheatley]

I sat in on an insurance seminar the other day, the various and numerous ambulance chasing legal types are already writing their template letters for people who are suffering or going to suffer musculo-skeletal injuries from having to spend a year working from the settee in their pyjamas. 

 

At least one of the companies on the call has already decided that, post covid, their home working policy will be that if you can't create a DSE compliant workstation at home, then you're in the office. 

 

I think commuting will change but I don't think it's going away. I have created a compliant workstation but that's not what I want to use that particular space in my home for long term, and there's nowhere else suitable. As soon as I can I'll be back in for most of the week. I might be in a minority but I doubt it will be a minority of one. 

Edited December 4, 2020 by Wheatley

[Kickstart]

I suspect there will be loads of hidden side effects. For example, how many people who are not comfy around others but up to now had got by just from practice are going to be facing anxiety issues when forced back to dealing with people?

 

All the best

 

Katy

[62613]

How much railway can you get for £1 billion?

 

[Dave47549]

.

 

 

Edited October 4, 2021 by Dave47549
Removed pointless guff

[The Stationmaster]

On 04/12/2020 at 18:26, 62613 said:

How much railway can you get for £1 billion?

 

At NR's prices - not a lot.  Although some of that is impsed from outside such as ecological studies and impact assessments but a loy of it is self-inflcted by its own disconnected bureaucracy.

[Kickstart]

From memory, for comparison  just under £1b was the cost of the M6 toll road (can add a fair bit to that for inflation since then). From memory there was talk 15 years ago of the cost of reopening the Stafford to Wellington line being around £250m (very much doubt economically viable even at that cost)

 

But I guess a lot depends on other factors. Reopening a closed line which hasn’t been developed over is probably relatively cheap. Once the track bed has been reused then the cost increases. And some of that reuse might not be obvious (eg, the village I live in was connected to the gas network via a pipe running beneath the closed line from Stafford to Wellington). A low speed line could have the alignment changed to avoid problem areas far more cheaply than a high speed line. A rural line is a lot cheaper than an urban line (doesn’t take many houses being knocked down to add £1m!)

 

All the best

 

Katy

[The Stationmaster]

Restoring double line to the 12.5 miles between Swindon and Kemble cost £45 million in 2014. (=£3.6 million per mile)  I remember a civil engineer saying to me back overt 40 years ago that the cost of relaying 1 mile of track was £1 million - that was just for track itself and ballast - no formation work but it presumably included removing the old track.

 

If you double that £1 million over, say c.35 years to get a very approximate 2014 figure that means the track for Swindon - Kemble cost £25 million.  The rest of the money was spent largely on recreating double line infrastructure on what had been a double line trackbed and fairly straightforward signalling work.  In comparison the Borders railway restoration pf part of the route was much more expensive but basically the formation needed total restoration in addition to the cost of laying the track plus new stations and theiur facilities had to be contructed. 

 

Construction costs for the Borders project, 40 route miles, were £295 million  (£7.38 million mile per mile) but that will also have included station costs.  The total project cost was £353 which is probably the more comparable cost with the figure for the Swindon - Kemble job and comes to £8.82 million per mile.

 

Overall, and allowing a bit for inflation you can probably reckon now on a total project cost per mile, including basic station provision) of around £10million per mile .  Sometimes it will be much less than that if there is a railway there already and in use and if there are fewer stations to reopen (i.e. build new) that will also keep down the cost.  So depending on what is there to start with the total project cost would probably vary between something like £5 million per mile and c.£10 million per mile.  So at best the £1 billion would have bought 200 miles of reopened railway and at worst it would have bought 100 miles of reopened railway.   In the case of some of the ideas mentioned the cost would have been at the high end of that scale.

[Wheatley]

For context 1 billion pounds is 13% of Network Rail's maintenance budget for CP6, or, roughly what they would have spent on maintenance from the start of Lockdown 1.