The UK has suffered from a largely nationalised railway for 23 years since Network Rail was brought into 100% public ownership in 2002. All the track, signals, power systems, stations and all the land are in government ownership and control. The result has been an expensive mess. Another Transport Minister has sat studying things for a year and has now announced £1.1bn for more studies to answer the same question how to improve Northern Rail.
For the last 14 years successive governments have announced their decision to build a new high speed track from Manchester to Leeds but there is still little doing. Over this time period HS2 has seen costs quadruple and time delays lengthen, with both the previous and the present government accepting they cannot afford to press on with the two legs from the Midlands to Manchester and Leeds that were the original point of the scheme. HS2 has been completely nationalised throughout and given tens of billions of pounds more than budget. It will end up delivering half the railway for maybe three times the cost.
The government likes railways for environmental reasons, yet every new railway line is bitterly fought over by people who dislike the big impact rail tracks have on their landscape and for the noise and emissions from the trains. The Green lobby claim rail travel is greener than cars, as they assume it will be in an electric train and assume the power for the train will be all renewable. Both these assumptions are miles from the truth. Only 39% of the track is electrified so diesels are the dominant force on our railways. The power delivered to the system from the grid is only around 50% low CO2 and can be as little as 15% low CO2 on no wind and sun times. So overall only 20% of the trains meet their wishes.
Why given their views have governments failed to electrify the system and put in the renewable power they say it needs?
The Transport Department’s 2024-5 Accounts tell us the railways cost taxpayers £28bn in that year. £7bn went on a year’s spend on HS2 and £17.9bn on publicly owned Network Rail, with £3bn of other rail items of spending. The Expenditure Review 2025 forecasts £30bn for the current year. Network Rail last year only managed to collect £3.3 bn in Access charges from the train companies running the services and needed as always to rely on large sums from the Treasury. Whilst rail was spending £30bn the Department only spent £7 bn on the much more extensively used national road network. Even with Council spending on other roads it means government spends 30 times as much per rail mile travelled on trains as it spends per mile travelled on roads.
The capacity and speed issues could be eased by accelerated spending on digital signalling. If every train knows where every other train is on the network in real time and if there is an override control by the system operator more trains can be run safely per hour on the same stretch of track. More fast trains could be combined with stopping trains by building more short sections of by pass or overtaking track along key routes. These are much cheaper and quicker solutions than a scheme like HS 2 which was meant to both raise capacity and average speeds starting from now, only to find we are years off a single train making it from London to Birmingham, let alone Leeds or Manchester.
January 15, 2026
I dare say every possible comment has already been made, yet nothing has changed. And so it will continue. in the minds of most politicans, the sunk costs of HS2 are so great, dwarfing Rachel Reeves’s £22bn black hole, that they can only be justified by finishing the job as intended. In fact the correct decision is just to finish the job. Full stop. Now.
January 15, 2026
Agreed Peter – stop chattering and build the ruddy thing.
One solution that is not suggested now is private sector construction of railways. That was the approach in Victorian times and it delivered a substantial network at an affordable price…
January 15, 2026
“The government likes railways for environmental reasons“ what environmental reasons? when you consider the end connections (often two way car or taxi journeys at each end), the often very indirect routes taken, average occupancy of train over the whole day, professional staff and track maintenance they do not even save CO2 or even energy. So what environmental reasons are these? Also hugely inflexible as we saw with the storm a tree down, cabling down, or a small flood, a strike or landslide can kill all trains on that route. A car or van can just change the route round the obstacle. Also far more expensive per mile despite the over taxation of one circa 50% is tax for cars and subsidy for the other 50% is subsidy for trains.
Despite this market rigging a full car can cost less than 1/10 of a train ticked per person mile.
January 15, 2026
Infrastructure projects are always a problem in this country, because we give far too much sway to silly single issue groups.
At the moment, the green environmentalists have traction and many projects have inflated costs to satisfy the afore group. We have all heard about HS2 and the multi million pound BBC at Tunnel for example.
Common sense is no longer common in the UK amongst the politician classes.
January 15, 2026
Afore should read aforementioned.
January 15, 2026
The faults of the railway system are entirely the fault of the previous and the present Government, a plague on both their houses.
January 15, 2026
It’s just a signal to Labour’s former heartlands that “Labour still cares about them” when it patently doesn’t.
All it will do is keep some expensive civil design engineers in taxpayer-funded jobs for a few years, carrying out surveys (including a great many environmental ones) and drawing pretty plans …. which will never result in a spade in the ground.