UK transport secretary says full electrification of railways ‘not affordable right now’

16 comments

1. Whenever we need more money to send to Ukraine, its found.

   When Theresa May needed a spare £10bn to bribe the DUP to keep her in power, it was found.

   But whenever we need spare money to spend on the public sector, somehow its just too impossible to find.

2. What’s new? Although the railways should have been electrified long ago no one expects them to be just yet. I expect to see a mix of full electrification and battery power as the end game. Diesel will have a residual role for freight.

3. Good. Let’s get some fast diesels in and put electrification to bed.

   Nothing looks worse in the countryside than awful overhead cables and gantries 🤮

4. It’s a shame the coalition and conservative governments did sweet fa when we had rock bottom interest rates after the crisis in 2008.

   That would’ve been the best time to invest in infrastructure like this both to soften the blow of the recession and to take advantage of the cheap money.

5. Just so I am not totally embarrassed here. Could everybody who thought we had already done this, and quite a long time ago, please raise your hand.

6. Is it without doubt a benefit?

   Great Western mainline shows how costly it is.

   Battery technology has also advanced immensely over the last several years and full battery operated trains are coming online.

   Hybrid models are already full mature

   Seems without doubt that the technology direction doesn’t require the electrification of the railway.

7. When I used to commute to London, my trains were screwed so many times, not because they were electric (they were diesel) but because of problems with the overhead electric wires (which my trains didn’t even use).

   There would have to be some pretty huge benefits to overcome the reliability issues of the infrastructure.

8. See this is another example of non inflationary infrastructure investment we should be doing. Even borrow for it. Net zero? Reduced costs? Business for British steel?

   I suspect part of this, is the public clap back from overheads going up though.

9. Europe got bombed to hell 80 years ago so did Japan. And we still can’t build a modern railway today

10. This would not be a good use of government funds. It would cost billions for very little benefit in terms of capacity / reliability of the network. All the key high speed arterial lines are already electrified, it is mainly the capillary network that requires electrification.

    There are other elements of society that currently need funding over and above the railway network.

11. Yeah because I guess the train companies in this country receive such little money from fares, don’t they?

12. Not sure why anyone is surprised by this. Electrification of the railways is something that we’ve decreed “too expensive” since the 1960s, when we started to back away from the mass electrification that the Modernisation Plan called for. And since we’ve gone through the years of cheap credit, we’ve got no chance of it happening any time soon.

13. This is completely fair; Electrification has consistently ended up ridiculously over the initial estimations and budgets. The cheapest overspend was two billion over budget and left the project unfinished. Another railway upgrade in 2021 was revised to have the phase one be 11 billion, in 2014 the entire project was supposed to cost less than three hundred *million.*

    When you consider that around 60% of UK rail is *not* electrified as well as the costs to electrify in the UK, you’d probably need to double the full budget to be able to afford it.

    Downvoting this because you dislike the government doesn’t really change that electrification costs have consistently been at least ten times initial government planning, never mind what the public believes it to cost and in a few particularly bad cases, closer to fifty times.

14. Do politicians understand that running a govt is like owning a house? at least 10% of them are landlords and it shows. If you don’t take care of something, it will only cost more later on.

    My GCSE geography still comes in handy: multiplier effect!

15. It shouldn’t even be a discussion about affordability. We look at electrification like it’s one single giant project. That’s what we tried to do last time by saying we would do great western, Gospel Oak to barking, midland main line, Liverpool to Manchester and god knows what else all at the same time. After a 30 year hiatus of doing zero electrification.

    It isn’t one giant project. It’s a rolling programme. Set up one team to survey, design, install, commission. Even if it’s only affordable at 10 miles a year. The next 10 miles will be more efficient. And the 10 miles after that. If we can afford a bit more one year, accelerate the rolling programme with another team. Drive for efficiency in cost per mile.

    Bloody stupid government

16. We were still making steam trains when the Japanese first launched the bullet trains.

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