This is how the Swiss would have done HS2
Have you listened to the BBC's Derailed: The Story of HS2 yet? If not, you must.
Like so many of us, I have spent much of the last two decades watching the unfolding car crash (pardon the multimodal metaphor) of HS2 with horror and fascination.
But a simple, honest account of what went wrong has been lacking: there's been too much confirmation bias and too many fixed agendas. The BBC has - again - proved the value of the licence fee with a thorough and detailed account.
To listen to the story, HS2 is a parable of Britain: a larger-than-life demonstrator of how we build slowly, expensively and often without delivering the benefit.
And that's all true.
But there are also important lessons for rail specifically. To help bring these to life, allow me to talk you through how we'd have built HS2 if we were Swiss.
Swiss long-term funding
Let’s imagine, just for a moment, that in 2008 the UK had decided to adopt the Swiss approach.
In Switzerland, there’s a very different system. Capital investment in railways comes from the infrastructure fund, written into law. You can read more about that here.
It’s long-term, it’s guaranteed and it comes with a specific obligation: capital investment in new infrastructure has to happen every year.
In addition to long-term planning, the other big difference between Switzerland and the UK is they don't start with a project (e.g. HS2), they start with a timetable.
They pick a year in the future - 2045, say - and ask: what should the national train timetable look like then, if we want to meet our national objectives as a country?
They work out what a good timetable looks like in that future. Then they build backwards from there.
It sounds simple - even obvious - but it leads you to a very different way of working.
Start with the timetable
So, let’s imagine the UK had done this in 2008. What might the planners have noticed?
Well, first up, they'd have spotted that our major cities need more frequent and faster rail connections from suburbs to centres and that these are prevented at the moment by insufficient platform capacity in stations like Leeds, Manchester Piccadilly and Birmingham New Street. So we need more station capacity in our city centres.
They'd have identified that many suburban lines into city centres have drastically inadequate services due to slow trains having to share tracks with fast trains: for example, Coventry to Birmingham or Stoke to Manchester through stations like Poynton. So there needs to be new suburban capacity for fast trains so that places like Poynton can have more trains.
They'd have identified core intercity links that are far too slow: typically not to/from London, but some of the second-tier city connections that are extraordinarily slow: e.g. Birmingham to Manchester, Leeds to Nottingham or Sheffield to Birmingham. So there needs to be new faster connections between these cities, missing out many of the smaller stations.
Given wider Government priorities, they'd identify the need for more housing in the Oxford to Cambridge arc, and identify that this requires faster, more frequent stopping trains on the West Coast mainline to places like Milton Keynes, which means the fast tracks need to be used by slower trains, so the fastest trains need to run somewhere else.
Our carbon commitments mean they'd identify the need for more freight capacity, which means our existing mainlines need to have core speeds slower than they are at the moment so freight trains can be fitted amongst passenger trains.
And they'd identify that we just need more capacity on the core West Coast mainline, which connects almost all the UK's major cities.
Now, the Swiss wouldn’t stop there. They’d take all of those needs, and build a proper timetable — an actual train-by-train plan — that solves those problems. And then they’d ask: what infrastructure do we need to make this timetable possible?
As you've probably realised, this leads you to something that looks - in some ways - rather like HS2.
However, because they know exactly what they can afford, every year, forever, they could immediately identify that it's too expensive.
This is one of the most important points.
Because they know what they can afford, they can now value-engineer a version that fits. In the UK, no one really knows how much money the Treasury will be willing to release, or when. In Switzerland, there’s a budget envelope. It’s predictable.
So having come up with an unaffordable infrastructure plan to deliver a perfect timetable, they'd go back, iterate the timetable, tweak the infrastructure plan and adjust things until it all fits. And then they’d start building.
Not a megaproject.
But the things they’d start building wouldn’t be “HS2”.
That name wouldn’t exist. There’d be no glossy brand or separate company: no HS2 Ltd with its own culture and operating model and interface challenges. Just a series of connected but self-contained projects, each delivered by Network Rail as part of normal business.
They might start with new capacity between Coventry and Birmingham, as this is an acute pinchpoint, plus a new station in Manchester Piccadilly. Because the new track between Coventry and Birmingham needs to connect with the West Coast mainline somewhere between Coventry and Rugby, it can't be the arrow-straight alignment of HS2. So the trains will be slower than HS2 but that's ok - getting to Birmingham in 49 minutes isn't crucial: what's crucial is enabling better suburban connectivity in the West Midlands and creating new West Coast capacity. The new stretch of track would be designed in such a way that the trains can join from the West Coast initially (realising the West Midlands suburban benefits early) but also extended to London in future.
At the same time, they’d begin work on a new through-station at Manchester Piccadilly, to unlock suburban capacity into Manchester.
Neither project requires huge new technology or radical change - just good design and integration with the wider network.
Both the new line in Coventry and the new station in Manchester would have seen work start within years of 2007, so both would have been open for years by now, with the early benefits already realised. The suburban trains in the West Midlands and Manchester would already be running today.
From there, they’d keep going. One project after another, each one designed to deliver a real, usable benefit: but also slotting into a wider national timetable that’s slowly coming into view. Not as one big bang, but a rolling programme of cumulative upgrades, each one moving us closer to the timetable they envisaged at the start.
Better - and cheaper
Now, why does this cost less? Partly because you're not building a perfect railway: you’re building a useful one. You work within constraints.
And partly because you sequence delivery in a way that creates early benefits and keeps the supply chain warm. Because the supply chain knows that new infrastructure is always going to be built every year, the supply chain is geared up and ready, and costs are low. There is no inexperienced delivery organisation as these projects are a core part of Network Rail's job. I can't promise every part will be delivered on-time and on-budget but it's much more likely. And if something isn't late, it doesn't mean that the whole shebang is late - just that one project.
This isn't the approach we took.
We stopped and started. We pulled funding. We created a new delivery body from scratch. Then we asked it to do something unprecedented under political conditions that changed every six months. 18 years in - we still don't have a design for Euston! And then we wondered why the cost ballooned.
The absolutely crucial bit
None of this - none of it! - works without long-term funding certainty. It’s the foundation that makes all of the rest of it possible.
It’s not the money itself, but the discipline it imposes. You must spend every year. You must plan ahead. You must deliver.
The Treasury, to its credit, is trying to be careful with public money. But by refusing to commit long-term, it creates exactly the conditions that make infrastructure expensive. It forces us into last-minute decisions, bespoke justifications, bespoke delivery structures, bespoke mistakes.
In trying to save money, the Treasury is, unintentionally, the biggest driver of waste and inefficiency in UK infrastructure.
And if this counterfactual doesn’t make that clear, I’m not sure what will.
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