Have railways became too expensive to build/improve?

[mrmartin]

I did think it was design that was driving the problem, but HS2 seems to not show that. Take Euston for example; I think £400m has been spent so far on design. Which is obviously a ridiculous amount of money, but the build cost is estimated at £4bn, so design is only 10% of it? Imagine if you'd managed to get a streamlined design process costing £1m, you'd still have a £3.6bn construction cost?

Or are we saying that so much money gets spent on design that the design and requirements are so complicated that the construction cost is enormous? Ie people have to justify their £400mn of design spend by producing 100ks of documents?

 

[JamesT]

BR was all about standardisation by the time it got to the 70's and it served it well but the creation of Railtrack lead by outsiders who had contempt for anything BR had done and had to reinvent the wheel and then that was when the rot set in. Outside consultants got their claws in and wanted to reinvent everything and when that didn't work more consultants were bought it who didn't make it any better and then the industry got stuffed with 1000's of people man marking each other.

In BR I was the Project Engineer on many electrification schemes and that role encompassed planning, engineering, contract management and project managing the whole thing. What i had access to was the Divisional engineering teams who provided solutions and technical backup and they largely traded on their technical knowledge and experience and when an engineer signed the drawings off that was good enough. Now we have a plethora of process and procedures that make even straight forward repetitive tasks become weighed down with huge on costs as no one can be trusted anymore. Oh and once you get consultants involved they over engineer everything to ensure their reputation is protected. This could be overcome if there was a will again from the top that BR had and also govts that forced them to confront the waste and find cost effective safe solutions. Allowing NR to just load up the credit card and accept cost overruns as almost acceptable did severe damage to the BR culture of working with less and we now have a whole generation who can't accept that its being over engineered or that a cheaper solution will deliver perfectly well down a branch line.

Standardisation like making Class 16x deliberately incompatible with previous classes?

Not checking someone's work is one of the factors that led to the Clapham Junction crash. I don't think there's any chance of going back on that culture. BR may have managed to make do with less, but how much of that has resulted in temporary bodges that cost even more to rectify later?

 

[zwk500]

I did think it was design that was driving the problem, but HS2 seems to not show that. Take Euston for example; I think £400m has been spent so far on design. Which is obviously a ridiculous amount of money, but the build cost is estimated at £4bn, so design is only 10% of it? Imagine if you'd managed to get a streamlined design process costing £1m, you'd still have a £3.6bn construction cost?

HS2 is perhaps not representative of overall projects.

Or are we saying that so much money gets spent on design that the design and requirements are so complicated that the construction cost is enormous? Ie people have to justify their £400mn of design spend by producing 100ks of documents?

People don't produce documents for the sake of it - every document that is produced has a purpose, and that purpose is usually defined in either law or one of the engineering standards that the railway must adhere to.

It's all very fashionable to slam people in offices for hoarding all the money but the reality is that the railway is a very strictly regulated and highly qualified environment and the Engineers designing the projects usually don't have a vested interest in artificially extending the project, because they'd rather have the completion bonus and move on to the next one.

I have had a very tangential experience with a couple of rail projects and my observations are that the biggest avoidable costs come from: (in ascending order):
- Lack of accurate documentation at the start, forcing re-surveys and prep work. This is partly bad record-keeping, partly bad project handover and partly just a really old railway.
- The quality of the individual project manager is highly variable. I worked on 2 project simultaneously that were, prima facie, equivalent. One has gone to public consultation already and the other just stayed forever stuck in treacle predominantly because of the skills and abilities of each PM.
- The strictness of the regulations and standards is such that it is often more expensive to get permission from the ORR/RSSB to go with a more cost-effective option.
- Politicians refusing to accept the technical conclusions of qualified engineers. They are determined to have something so go with the options not recommended.
- Politicians changing their mind (either because the elections have changed people around or because the first set of bills have arrived).

The number of feasibility reports required and the cost of them is problematic, but fundamentally the railway is a complex beast and requires highly skilled, highly qualified people to design and build it. The railway does not do very much that is not required by law or the regulating body. So if you want e.g. less environmental impact reports (a modest cost in the scheme of projects, much overblown by the tabloids) then you will need to change the law to drop that requirement.

 

[HSTEd]

Also how could "Delays and massive cost escalations in transport projects, the focus of this thread, ... easily kill more people than would be killed by the construction work"? that is going to need some explanation?

Rail transport or simlar projects tend to be much safer than other transport modes, for example, road transport.

By delaying the completion of a project you leave traffic on a modal distribution with a lower average safety, which kills people. Either by accidents or air pollution or any number of other mechanisms.
They still die, even if their deaths may be undetectable except by statistical methods (and in some cases not even then).

I don't agree - have you an example that you could share to illustrate the point?

The stereotype nuclear version of this story is the Sellafield MOX plant.

Allegedly, a consultantcy started using a very large disproportion factor on safety analyses of a peice of equipment they were making for the MOX plant.
Unfortunately when the regulator saw that analysis it decided that that disproportion factor was a great idea and insisted that it be used by everyone, allegedly.

That then ended up forcing everyone else to add huge numbers of engineered safety features to all the equipment in the plant, resulting in a plant so overcomplicated it was impossible to actually operate.

Risk Assesments, especially when dealing with highly dispersed risk over very large populations, are very easy to drive to produce insane results. The nuclear industry is the worst example of this, but it is found in other industries too.

 

[Sad Sprinter]

It seems impossible to get anything built in this country. Railways, houses, you name it. And yet we have grinning politicians that have somehow conned themselves to believing Britain has "world class" this and "world class that"...

What I want to know, is what on earth will happen if we actually said "sod it" and just spent money? What if we just did things like splurge on electrification, grade separate bottlenecks, reopen closed lines. What is the worst thing that could possibly happen?

It all reminds me of that American Psycho meme, to paraphrase:

"Why isn't it possible, to invest in the railways?
HMG: "It's just not."
"Why not you stupid b*****d?"

 

[zwk500]

What I want to know, is what on earth will happen if we actually said "sod it" and just spent money? What if we just did things like splurge on electrification, grade separate bottlenecks, reopen closed lines. What is the worst thing that could possibly happen?

In theory, hyperinflation. In reality we would only run into problems if we decided to rebuild the entire network to UIC GC gauge with OLE.

However it is a political choice that the UK should pursue a level of ongoing spending capable of being covered (or nearly covered) by the revenue the government earns.

 

[HSTEd]

In theory, hyperinflation. In reality we would only run into problems if we decided to rebuild the entire network to UIC GC gauge with OLE.

Although obviously at that point it would be cheaper to bin the existing network and build a new one.

Obviously a conceptually simpler job too, so it would hit the other cost drivers you mentioned in your earlier post......

 

[bib]

The planning process in general makes it expensive to do anything that involves major infrastructure building work I think. Eg I was looking at an application for a drive through coffee shop near where I live and the traffic impact report was over 450 pages. And that's only one of the aspects that needed a separate report. But I guess these things are somewhat necessary to stop things that would have large negative impacts.

It would be interesting to see the actual breakdown of spend on some sort of rail project, and see what the largest costs are, if anyone has one to hand?

I'd guess the cost of wages would suprise a lot of people. Eg £1m is a huge amount of money to Joe bloggs, if the average salary is not much more than 25k that could be your entire earnings over a 40 year career. But if you took that and tried to get some railways work done it wouldn't stretch very far at all. Eg senior consultant charge out rates can easily be £1k/day , plus mark-ups if they're working as sub-contractors , so you might get 4 people working for a year for £1m? Or if you're doing all your infrastructure work at nights or weekends then I presume everyone is on a nice multiplier to account for unsociable hours etc? And with the added layers of management and contractors on bigger projects it all adds up. But on the other hand if you are moving tonnes of soil and ballast and steel around using millions of pounds worth of machinery to do so, that can't be cheap either.

I don't know if the SPEED thing was shown to have any cost savings?

 

[zwk500]

Although obviously at that point it would be cheaper to bin the existing network and build a new one.

Obviously a conceptually simpler job too, so it would hit the other cost drivers you mentioned in your earlier post......

Not sure it'd be conceptually simpler - as HS2 is showing, it's damned difficult to find corridors available for new lines now.

One thing to note is that because of the way projects are charged, some of the most effective things the Rail industry could do to reduce overall project costs won't ever be authorised.
E.g. The complete resurveying of the network from Relevant Zero datums into Metres. This would save an awful lot of project time having to send out a survey team for each project, but because the savings wouldn't come back to the resurveying project it won't happen.
Likewise having the Sectional Appendix in a single scrollable format, with proper APIs and searchable functionality. The PDFs are woeful and NESA isn't an awful lot better, especially with the lack of assurance. Similarly there are multiple independent systems that together contain a digital dataset of pretty much the entire network, but nobody can justify the project to unify them into a single system that any rail industry employee could download reports for. It would streamline and improve the accuracy of so many feasibility studies if this happens (and the Dutch and Germans have it, so it's perfectly possible) but because it doesn't produce a saving or profit on it's own it'll never get approval.

 

[Snow1964]

There is also strange ratio of staff and machinery, today at Bradford-on-Avon one excavator with operator and 7 others to stand around watching road surface being removed from bridge deck. Does it really need 8 people ?

Photo attached

 

[geoffk]

At a recent meeting we were discussing how well the Okehampton reopening had gone - completed in nine months and £10m under budget. But this was essentially a track laying project - no consultants, no resignalling and no new stations (Okehampton station will have needed some work but basically it was already there).

In 2005, a report by management consultant Arthur D. Little for Alistair Darling, then Secretary of State for Transport, argued that the string of rail disasters over the past few years had created a "pervasive and self-sustaining culture of risk-averse or over-cautious behaviour in the UK rail industry". "Decisions that in the past were made by competent, front-line staff are being taken by more senior management who lack the technical expertise," the report says. The rail industry relies on "excessive analysis instead of professional judgment, to protect against personal liability," it argues. Any know what happened to this report? Maybe it went into the "too difficult" tray.

 

[Wolfie]

It seems to me in the UK construction costs for railways are now so high that there is really no benefit cost measure that will be much above 1, despite extremely aggressively hyping the economic benefits.

Someone in another thread was wanting the £29bn roads plan to be cancelled (similar to welsh govt) and invested into railways/public transport. But what would that actually buy? 100km of high speed rail? Maybe 200 route km of 'total track' upgrade like TRU? It's not really going to be transformative to the UK economy outside of the small area it covers, unfortunately - and I speak as someone who is extremely pro HS2.

Even small stations seem to cost an eye watering amount, that are extremely hard to justify.

Take Bristol for example, it desperately needs some sort of heavyish rail system, but projected costs of a metro were £10bn+. Compare that to the Tyne and Wear metro; which cost about £250m in 1984 money, or about £1bn now adjusted for inflation. I imagine these schemes are roughly comparable in scope, yet the bristol cost projection is 10x that in inflation adjusted numbers. Something has clearly went really wrong here. £1bn seems to buy you a few km of four tracking and electrification, or one station on the EL (whitechapel cost around that i believe?).

Ironically there is much more cross party political will these days to invest in railways, but the costs are so high that it is hard to justify. What's even more worrying is it doesn't seem to me that cost increases are slowing down at all, if anything the opposite. Perhaps in 10 years that £10bn projection for a bristol metro will look extremely affordable?

I note that you correctly cite rising costs in railway maintenance/improvement/construction while ignoring the parallel increases in doing the same thing for roads....

 

[zwk500]

There is also strange ratio of staff and machinery, today at Bradford-on-Avon one excavator with operator and 7 others to stand around watching road surface being removed from bridge deck. Does it really need 8 people ?

Photo attached

Presumably the 8 people have responsibilities that cannot be carried out until the excavator is done excavating. After all, a hard hat is no match for a hydraulic ram if you happen to be underneath the bucket and the operator doesn't know.

 

[Mordac]

At a recent meeting we were discussing how well the Okehampton reopening had gone - completed in nine months and £10m under budget. But this was essentially a track laying project - no consultants, no resignalling and no new stations (Okehampton station will have needed some work but basically it was already there).

In 2005, a report by management consultant Arthur D. Little for Alistair Darling, then Secretary of State for Transport, argued that the string of rail disasters over the past few years had created a "pervasive and self-sustaining culture of risk-averse or over-cautious behaviour in the UK rail industry". "Decisions that in the past were made by competent, front-line staff are being taken by more senior management who lack the technical expertise," the report says. The rail industry relies on "excessive analysis instead of professional judgment, to protect against personal liability," it argues. Any know what happened to this report? Maybe it went into the "too difficult" tray.

Changing that would require changing the law of criminal negligence, which is a nettle successive governments have refused to grasp despite the current law being a nonsensical mess.

 

[Snow1964]

Presumably the 8 people have responsibilities that cannot be carried out until the excavator is done excavating. After all, a hard hat is no match for a hydraulic ram if you happen to be underneath the bucket and the operator doesn't know.

And presumably the generator with spotlights has been hired in, because of a contingency that sun forgets to rise today and daytime worksite is left in darkness.

No wonder costs have risen.

 

[Nicholas Lewis]

In 2005, a report by management consultant Arthur D. Little for Alistair Darling, then Secretary of State for Transport, argued that the string of rail disasters over the past few years had created a "pervasive and self-sustaining culture of risk-averse or over-cautious behaviour in the UK rail industry". "Decisions that in the past were made by competent, front-line staff are being taken by more senior management who lack the technical expertise," the report says. The rail industry relies on "excessive analysis instead of professional judgment, to protect against personal liability," it argues. Any know what happened to this report? Maybe it went into the "too difficult" tray.

Oh thats good find and exactly sums up how BR worked with judgement learnt from being on the job for many years with experienced staff. Good though that was it also potentially allowed less than ideal practice to become embedded so establishing appropriate competency requirements for roles was no bad thing that NR established.

What we need now is halfway house between BR and NR but who will ever lead the charge on that now?

 

[zwk500]

And presumably the generator with spotlights has been hired in, because of a contingency that sun forgets to rise today and daytime worksite is left in darkness.

No wonder costs have risen.

Or maybe they're planning some works overnight or at dusk and it's cheaper to block-book the generator than to have it in for a night at a time?

 

[matacaster]

Standardisation does not (currently) relieve you of the requirement for a risk assessment.

You end up spending huge sums of money on design iteration as a result.


30 deaths is tragic, but given that 600,000 people die every year.....

Delays and massive cost escalations in transport projects, the focus of this thread, could easily kill more people than would be killed by the construction work.

For every person killed in construction 50 are killed on the roads.

The reality is that they are increasingly the same, due to the extreme disproportion factors that are insisted upon by modern regulators.

Of course no one wants any changes construction deaths, but it should be borne in mind that sadly deaths are sometimes caused by failure of the people involved to follow basic rules. No amount of money and extra safety precautions will prevent deaths if people are foolhardy or careless.

 

[mrmartin]

HS2 is perhaps not representative of overall projects.

People don't produce documents for the sake of it - every document that is produced has a purpose, and that purpose is usually defined in either law or one of the engineering standards that the railway must adhere to.

It's all very fashionable to slam people in offices for hoarding all the money but the reality is that the railway is a very strictly regulated and highly qualified environment and the Engineers designing the projects usually don't have a vested interest in artificially extending the project, because they'd rather have the completion bonus and move on to the next one.

I have had a very tangential experience with a couple of rail projects and my observations are that the biggest avoidable costs come from: (in ascending order):
- Lack of accurate documentation at the start, forcing re-surveys and prep work. This is partly bad record-keeping, partly bad project handover and partly just a really old railway.
- The quality of the individual project manager is highly variable. I worked on 2 project simultaneously that were, prima facie, equivalent. One has gone to public consultation already and the other just stayed forever stuck in treacle predominantly because of the skills and abilities of each PM.
- The strictness of the regulations and standards is such that it is often more expensive to get permission from the ORR/RSSB to go with a more cost-effective option.
- Politicians refusing to accept the technical conclusions of qualified engineers. They are determined to have something so go with the options not recommended.
- Politicians changing their mind (either because the elections have changed people around or because the first set of bills have arrived).

The number of feasibility reports required and the cost of them is problematic, but fundamentally the railway is a complex beast and requires highly skilled, highly qualified people to design and build it. The railway does not do very much that is not required by law or the regulating body. So if you want e.g. less environmental impact reports (a modest cost in the scheme of projects, much overblown by the tabloids) then you will need to change the law to drop that requirement.

The problem is though which consultant is going to say "we probably don't need to do that report - we will do it later if needed?". Absolutely noone. They have a huge incentive for doing as many reports as possible.

And we often seem to have teams of consultants managing teams of consultants on behalf of government.

I don't have personal experience with this, but if it is anything like how the big consultants deliver IT projects, I imagine the waste is absolutely crazy. I've seen big consultants fail to deliver IT projects with 300 people over years (perhaps indeed because they have 300 people) that a team of 2 or 3 developers could deliver in a few months.

 

[zwk500]

Of course no one wants any changes construction deaths, but it should be borne in mind that sadly deaths are sometimes caused by failure of the people involved to follow basic rules. No amount of money and extra safety precautions will prevent deaths if people are foolhardy or careless.

Indeed. Although perhaps looking at how many people currently die is the wrong end, and we should instead be asking what the impact of the measures taken is in saving lives. It's also one thing to measure serious injuries and work out whether they might be fatal, quite another to work out how many incidents never took place at all because of proper procedure and protection.

The problem is though which consultant is going to say "we probably don't need to do that report - we will do it later if needed?". Absolutely noone. They have a huge incentive for doing as many reports as possible.

And we often seem to have teams of consultants managing teams of consultants on behalf of government.

I don't have personal experience with this, but if it is anything like how the big consultants deliver IT projects, I imagine the waste is absolutely crazy.

For sure, the waste is crazy - but that comes back to my earlier post. You need to pick the right Project Manager, even if they are a consultant, and set up the penalties and rewards appropriately.

I've seen big consultants fail to deliver IT projects with 300 people over years (perhaps indeed because they have 300 people) that a team of 2 or 3 developers could deliver in a few months.

Indeed - smaller teams are far better. Of the projects I referred to above, the one that moved forward rarely if ever had more than 10 people on each call and nearly everybody said something at some point in each meeting they attended. On the one that never went anywhere we'd have 30 people, always chopping and changing because nobody knew what each meeting was for and so we'd have a 10 minute round of introductions every time, in additional to people being generally bored and disengaged.

 

[DarloRich]

There is also strange ratio of staff and machinery, today at Bradford-on-Avon one excavator with operator and 7 others to stand around watching road surface being removed from bridge deck. Does it really need 8 people ?

Photo attached

And presumably the generator with spotlights has been hired in, because of a contingency that sun forgets to rise today and daytime worksite is left in darkness.

No wonder costs have risen.

these are not serious posts surely.

 

[HSTEd]

Likewise having the Sectional Appendix in a single scrollable format, with proper APIs and searchable functionality. The PDFs are woeful and NESA isn't an awful lot better, especially with the lack of assurance. Similarly there are multiple independent systems that together contain a digital dataset of pretty much the entire network, but nobody can justify the project to unify them into a single system that any rail industry employee could download reports for. It would streamline and improve the accuracy of so many feasibility studies if this happens (and the Dutch and Germans have it, so it's perfectly possible) but because it doesn't produce a saving or profit on it's own it'll never get approval.

Those PDFs don't even make use of the functionality available in the PDF format!

There should be links to allow you to jump to the relevant route from the relevant map, and a proper contents page.

 

[zwk500]

Those PDFs don't even make use of the functionality available in the PDF format!

There should be links to allow you to jump to the relevant route from the relevant map, and a proper contents page.

You cannot imagine the list of issue I have with the Sectional Appendices, PDF and NESA.

 

[DarloRich]

The stereotype nuclear version of this story is the Sellafield MOX plant.

Allegedly, a consultantcy started using a very large disproportion factor on safety analyses of a peice of equipment they were making for the MOX plant.
Unfortunately when the regulator saw that analysis it decided that that disproportion factor was a great idea and insisted that it be used by everyone, allegedly.

That then ended up forcing everyone else to add huge numbers of engineered safety features to all the equipment in the plant, resulting in a plant so overcomplicated it was impossible to actually operate.

Risk Assesments, especially when dealing with highly dispersed risk over very large populations, are very easy to drive to produce insane results. The nuclear industry is the worst example of this, but it is found in other industries too.

yeah, ok - I will give you that one! MOX was/is/will remain as scandal on many levels and not just cost. ( See Private Eye passim!)

That said, in the field of Nuclear power I think I will accept platinum plating on everything due to the damage the alternative can do!

( The problem on the regulatory side is that they can, too often, rely on consultants for expertise that should really be held in house.)

 

[Snow1964]

these are not serious posts surely.

The first one was serious in reply to numbers of consultants and costs, rather than using expertise of operators, I illustrated it with a job removing a bit of road surface on a blocked off road, with 7 people standing watching the excavator, on a job that is running 6 months late.

If you don't think it was serious at showing high costs, please explain why one excavator needs 8 people, or what the roles might have been.

 

[DarloRich]

The first one was serious in reply to numbers of consultants and costs, rather than using expertise of operators, I illustrated it with a job removing a bit of road surface on a blocked off road, with 7 people standing watching the excavator, on a job that is running 6 months late.

If you don't think it was serious at showing high costs, please explain why one excavator needs 8 people, or what the roles might have been.

I doubt you are interested in the reality. It wont match your view point which I maintain is not serious.

The contractors for the water board are digging hole down the road and are replacing the water main. There are 6 or 7 blokes on that job and when the excavator is in use they all have to get out of the trench and stand about. That seems fairly sensible to me because, as I say above, I would rather the job cost a few quid more and they all went home at the end of the day!

 

[zwk500]

There are 6 or 7 blokes on that job and when the excavator is in use they all have to get out of the trench and stand about. That seems fairly sensible to me because, as I say above, I would rather the job cost a few quid more and they all went home at the end of the day!

It's a bit like when people complain about trackworkers standing about doing nothing while the train rolls by - well you wouldn't want them to be working on the track the train is on would you!

Again, as I mention above, a hard hat is not Captain America's shield. If you drop a bucket full of stones on it, or indeed a digger bucket itself, then the hat is only going to put up so much of a fight, and the person wearing it is going to very much know about it.

 

[DarloRich]

What I want to know, is what on earth will happen if we actually said "sod it" and just spent money? What if we just did things like splurge on electrification, grade separate bottlenecks, reopen closed lines. What is the worst thing that could possibly happen?

national bankruptcy?

 

[Mag_seven]

This thread is for discussion of the railways becoming more expensive to build / improve.

I've moved some off topic posts about Housebuilding to this thread:

UK Housebuilding discussion

Moderator note: split from https://www.railforums.co.uk/threads/have-railways-became-too-expensive-to-build-improve.247896/ It seems impossible to get anything built in this country. Railways, houses, you name it. And yet we have grinning politicians that have somehow conned themselves to...

www.railforums.co.uk

 

[MikeWM]

Isn't there an element of we want to do A and B, and then eventually people demand C, D, E, ..., M making it a huge project?

That certainly appears to be part of the problem; a good example would be the Ely North upgrade, which now seems to have been kicked into the long grass.

What should be a fairly simple 'put a bit of track in to put the junction back to the way it was 40 years ago' balloons into 'ah, that'll increase capacity so we'll have to upgrade the level crossings for miles around, even the really quiet ones', which balloons into 'ah, the upgraded level crossings will have the barriers down for too long so we'll have to add road and pedestrian alternatives, including building a massive road bridge right in the middle of an SSSI', which balloons into 'well, that's got too expensive, we can't afford to do it'.

As such this highly necessary improvement just doesn't get done. It's really quite depressing.