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
Before the arrival of widely owned personal transport e.g. the car
January 15, 2026
Railways are not green, they are an environmental disaster. The Victorians gave us a viable and comprehensive rail system which Beeching destroyed. As with the trams in cities lines were ripped up and roads relayed only to be ripped up again.
Governments like mass transport as a means of controlling the population they hate the freedom and flexibility of the car over which they have little control.
As you say railways should be completely digitised and the trains made driverless which would save a fortune.
January 15, 2026
@Peter Gardner – yup keep making the same mistakes, in exactly the same way and they are always surprised the end result is still the same failure
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
If trains received no subsidies and were taxed as cars are (with fuel duty, VAT, motorist muggings etc.) at circa 50% they would become circa four times as expensive as currently. So what then would the real fair market demand be for trains then, perhaps half current demand or so which would put fares up yet again! On most routes and journey they simply cannot compete at all. With self driving taxis, cars and hire cars coming they will become even less competitive too.
Perhaps build houses on the land released. Where is a Dr Beaching when you need one? Has anyone calculated how much the Beaching cuts saved us in train subsidies since the sixties?
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
This sort of well researched post from JR is worth reading carefully. I have friends in the North and the current railway arrangements are slow and the carriages are ancient. A better cross-Pennines link is necessary because in the winter the road link is frequently cut by snow (Snake Pass)
The Northern Powerhouse was one of Osborne’s better ideas. It’s a pity that he didn’t organise a proper funding model and drive it through. Now, a decade and a half later with interest rates so high its going to cost much more
Upgrading the signalling to modern standards would make a difference to both track capacity and train speed. There may be technical reasons why this has not yet been done
January 15, 2026
It would be worth remembering what rail is exceptionally good at. Moving repeat heavy bulk loads from ports to central distribution points up and down the country. Also for moving bulk such as coal and ore from pit head or quarry to the power stations or smelters without clogging up our roads with thousands and thousands of lorries every day.
Now with that in mind it should not come as a shock to realise the core feature of rail transport movement of bulk freight no longer exists while our Net Zero policies are being pursued thus rail is another stranded technology only existing via tax payer support as a legacy to its past.
The use of rail around our major cities is obviously beneficial for passenger transport. Those areas of rail should be profitable to operate, but only if run efficiently by good management. Sadly they are not making profits because they are run as cash cows by the unions.
We live in hope of change, but are increasingly frustrated at the lack of economic reality in our public sector run activities.
I am sure the efficiency gains secured by the recent huge pay increases awarded to all public sectors by the (union sponsored) Labour government will kick in at some point, well they might, had they sought any…..
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.
January 15, 2026
How very true. An army of ‘consultants’ for just about everything going. Millions spent, warehouse loads of documents produced and yet ,everything seems to stay the bloody same!!
Millions, if not billions, shelled out for talking shops stuffed to the gills with those allegedly at the top of their field, who often just state the bleeding obvious or show they don’t really know how the every day nuts and bolts of the subject works. It’s all a ‘look important and shuffle some papers’ exercise.
No matter, the money keeps pouring in.
The problem is no one is actually truly accountable for the fleecing of the public, are they.
January 15, 2026
Successive Governments seem to have a fixation with rail, instead of just accepting some of its obvious limitations.
Rail is a fine way to travel if you can afford it, and the start and end journey is a very short distance from the Station.
One person going by rail into London or any large city is only worth it if the journey is not too far in distance, as the cost and availability of Parking, ULEZ, and Congestion charges add to the standard cost of using a car.
Longer distances or more people will favour the car as the most efficient and cost effective, even given the extra charges Outlined, are then set against more passengers in the one vehicle.
January 15, 2026
“government spends 30 times as much per rail mile travelled on trains as it spends per mile travelled on roads.”
Astonishing. Add in fuel duty, road tax, vat on car sales, and the net difference is truly massive.
January 15, 2026
How many more times do we have to spell it out Parliament cant do things, at best they can only create frameworks for others to get on with what is needed.
How much proof does Parliament need that neither themselves or the Establishment(the BLOB) they manage, organise and run have the Worlds worst record on delivery.
Its no good keep re-running things that fail in the manner they fail and then expect a different outcome, you would have to be a lunatic to expect different.
January 15, 2026
“More fast trains could be combined with stopping trains by building more short sections of by pass or overtaking track along key routes”
Yes, incremental change for incremental improvement Sir John – especially if you cannot do big & complicated it seems…
However, a fundamental rethink of railway use should be undertaken to both link demand to provision and to encoursge the movement of heavy & bulk frieght off the roads.
I use the railway when I have to go into London (which I do not do if I can avoid it) but it is slow and inconvenient. All of my other journeys are by car. Quicker, less expensive and door to door – with all the stuff Mrs T demands to travel with (including the kitchen sink) easily transported. Get the big trucks off our Motorways by charging by weight/mile – including the foreign ones. (Re)build freight distribution hubs and automate not just signalling but the trains themselves. A robot train doesn’t mind waiting, no more than a parcel does. Pay per mile is coming anyway I suspect, so start with heavy transport. They are harder to electrify than the train network and would free up much needed road space.
January 15, 2026
Apparently an initial £1.1bn has been earmarked for design and preparation work and preparation , with construction not expected to start until after 2030. That sounds an awful lot of money for consultants at the taxpayers’ expense. Nice work if you can get it!
January 15, 2026
Taking all the data as correct AND the government has these same figures, I’d suggest they actually read them and think again of the damage that mad policies have done and continue to do so to OUR now little Britain.
Are they so complicated that a succession of Ministers have buried their heads in the sand and relied upon political career professional Mandarins and Civil servants to tell them what to do?
Why doesn’t any Government take on specialists from the Private Sector to advise on such matters? After all, what Civil Servant has any hands-on experience building railways? Ditto Transport Ministers.
Knowledge is Power!
January 15, 2026
Well the line between Middlesborough and Sunderland needs an upgrade. but the people in the Labour party shouting about “The North” seem to consider Manchester/Leeds/maybe Liverpool if you are lucky “The North”. They aint been to, or ever mentioning, Barrow, or Carlisle, and they aint been to the places on the East like Sunderland or Middlesbrough either. They dont have a prioritised list of where investments could have the biggest impact on the country, worked out factually and scientifically. They just have a lot of prejudices. The public sector including Network Rail HQ are just as bad.
This is another massive weakness of the Labour party that the opposition parties should be hammering them on.
But sadly I dont see this getting fixed no matter who wins elections, the incumbent blob of senior public sector are doing exactly what they want regardless of what politicians swan in or out.
January 15, 2026
HS2 was never devised to provide additional capacity and make rail travel affordable and reliable between London and the North. If it was it would have been designed for affordability and capacity and not speed. We should have had the rail equivalent of a jumbo jet and instead Parliament went for a Concorde both for vanity and to enable MPs and civil servants to travel at speed up and down the country and, of course, provide a connecting rail link from the North to the EU. The high speed was designed to ensure that it would be unaffordable except for those travelling at tax-payers’ expense. It has now just become a white elephant but is still seen by the socialists as a great way to spend vast quantities of tax-payers’ money in order to justify high taxation and impoverish the nation. So it will continue.