HS2 green corridor video is misinformation

On 25 June, high speed rail minister Nusrat Munir Ul-Ghani and HS2 chief executive Mark Thurston were in Warwickshire to launch the ‘HS2 green corridor’ at Dale House Farm, but apparently ended up locked in the farm, awaiting a locksmith.

Despite her envelope difficulties, Ms Ghani managed to give an interview to ITV Central News, coming across as not having much interest in the environment.

[Warwick Courier, 25 Jun 2018]

[HS2 Ltd claims] the green corridor will result in over nine square kilometres of new native woodlands and habitats for species including bats, badgers and great crested newts.

But The Woodland Trust slammed the plans and said HS2 would devastate the environment. Luci Ryan, ecologist at the Woodland Trust said: “This is utter greenwash nonsense from an organisation trying to pretend that HS2 isn’t the most environmentally destructive infrastructure project this country has seen in decades.

“Some 98 beautiful, rare, irreplaceable ancient woods will be destroyed or damaged by this scheme. That’s 98 habitats and ecosystems that support a whole host of mammals, birds, invertebrates, fungi and plants.”

HS2 Ltd also added a curious and misinformational video about the green corridor to its Youtube channel, featuring a sort of computer-game landscape with mutant trees, and stripe-free badgers.

The video claimed phase one would be open ‘by 2026’.

Other oddities of the video included: no sign of any fencing off of the railway from the surrounding land, no sign of any service roads alongside the tracks, and no overhead line structures.

In some frames, the trains in the animation seem to have a pantograph ‘well’, but no pantograph. In other frames, there is a raised pantograph drawing maints ampères from completely invisible overhead line equipment.

Quite an achievement, considering the massive amounts of energy the trains would consume. According to KPMG, HS2 could increase the electricity requirement of GB rail by 40 to 67 per cent. The upstream capex required to provide this power is not on HS2’s books, but would have to be paid for somehow.

The HS2 is officially estimated to cost £55.7 billion, so the green(-wash) corridor just announced, would amount to ~0.01% of the total spend.

Pitch and cell

In an article by Perry Boeker and published on fuel cell company Ballard’s website, Jochen Steinbauer, Director of Platform and Business Development for alternative drive systems for regional trains at Siemens, shared his views on hydrogen train technology for rail applications.

[Ballard blog]

[JS:] First of all, from a global perspective, the U.K. is the most advanced with respect to hydrogen technology deployment. They have proclaimed that no diesel cars can enter certain cities. Plus they already announced that diesel powered vehicles will be completely prohibited by 2040, including trains.

Midland Metro will become West Midlands Metro as services are taken over by Midland Metro

Air ‘cleansed by diesel engines’

Tom Stables, managing director of National Express West Midlands – “Birmingham’s leading bus company” – says “Buses are the solution to pollution”.

[National Express offering 24hrs free bus travel for every Birmingham passenger!, Neil Elkes, Birmingham Live, 20 Jun 2018]

The bus company has invested millions in cleaner engines, both buying new low emission vehicles and retro-fitting existing buses with devices to clean the exhaust fumes coming out.

It says the new exhaust systems make the air coming out of the tailpipe cleaner than the air that went in. Birmingham City Council has also invested in a new fleet of hydrogen fuelled buses which are cleaner and more efficient.

Ave caramba

High speed rail (Ave) accounts for 26 billion euro of ‘inappropriate’ expenditure of public funds in Spain over the period 1995 to 2016, according to a study published by the Association of Spanish Geographers.

That would suggest that the programmed expenditure on Britain’s HS2 railway (€70++ billion) vastly exceeds the outlay on the Spanish Ave system (which is the second largest in the world).

Although shorter in route length, HS2 is a much bigger waste of money than Ave.

Birmingham Clean Air Zone proposals fall short

Drivers of the heaviest polluting cars face a charge of up to £10 per day to travel into Birmingham City Centre from 2020 under pollution-busting plans unveiled by council transport bosses, Birmingham Live reported.

[Details of clean air zone charge for Birmingham revealed and it’s not all bad for drivers, Neil Elkes, Birmingham Live, 19 Jun 2018]

Details emerged as the council announced a summer of consultation into its plans for a Clean Air Zone.

But, after much speculation, drivers whose cars meet the Euro 4 petrol standard – mostly vehicles made since 2006 – and Euro 6 diesel, mostly manufactured since 2015, will NOT have to pay.

However, the available documents published by Birmingham city council suggest that its preferred option for a so-called Clean Air Zone would not actually ‘bust’ pollution. The Zone would only apply to the area within the Middle Ring Road, and even within that zone, modelling suggests that ‘additional measures’ would be necessary to bring pollution within legal limits.

The notion that the CAZ-as-proposed is about ‘charging drivers of the heaviest polluting cars’ is fanciful. Because many recently manufactured Euro 6 diesels are themselves among the heaviest polluting cars.

All in all, the currently ‘preferred’ CAZ looks like a rushed and amateurish response to the pollution challenge. Much more imagination is needed, but that seems to be in desperately short supply.

Sum kind of overspend

The “dysfunctional” HS2 high-speed rail company has pressed staff to falsify figures, mislead parliament and cover up “petrifying” overspends, according to claims reported in The Sunday Times.

[HS2 ‘covered up petrifying overspends’, Andrew Gilligan, The Sunday Times, 17 June 2018 (paywall)]

In documents seen by The Sunday Times, Doug Thornton, HS2’s former head of property, said the organisation put him under “tremendous pressure to accede to an enormous deceit” that the official budget for buying land and buildings was accurate.

As recounted by the story,

• Mr Thornton and the former head of planning and performance, Andrew Bruce, departed HS2 in 2016, as the bill for phase one (London – West Midlands) reached a critical stage in parliament
• both men have given evidence to the National Audit Office, which is investigating HS2’s land and property budget
• HS2 Ltd maintains that buying the 11,000 properties needed to construct phase one would cost £2.8 billion, but Mr Bruce had calculations showing the sum could be around £4.7 billion.

At the time of writing, on his LinkedIn entry, it is stated that Mr Bruce “Developed the programme for the purchase of £4.8 Bn worth of land and property” for HS2 Ltd.

Elevated risk means increased cost

Multiple sources close to the HS2 project have confirmed that ‘interim costs’ for main civil works for phase one submitted by contractors are currently above HS2 Ltd’s target cost of £6.6 billion (New Civil Engineer reported).

[HS2 civil works £1bn above target cost, Katherine Smale, NCE, 12 June 2018]

While one source said that the collective price was coming in at “around £1.2bn” over budget, another said that some bids were “as much as 30% to 40% higher” than their individual target price.

As a result, NCE understands that the notice to proceed has been pushed back from November until February 2019 with one source claiming that they had been told to “go away and sharpen their pencils” to cut costs.

[…] However, a HS2 spokesperson said that the project “remains on track, and within [the] original cost package”.

Last month, NCE’s sister publication Ground Engineering reported how the cost of delivering HS2 could rise sharply as a result of the use of target cost contracts without geotechnical baseline reports (GBRs).

[HS2 price hike warning over rejection of risk allocation tool, Ground Engineering, 3 MAY, 2018, BY CLAIRE SMITH]

[…] “HS2 has not got enough data to be able to get the work to target cost,” [an engineer who has worked closely on the project] told GE. “When you look at the availability and quality of the ground investigation data, in some areas it is good but in other there is none and there is a risk associated with that. Contractors will price according to this risk and so the target cost will go up.

[…] “Some will say that the technical standards are too onerous but it is the risk allocation that is the problem. HS2 choosing not to use GBRs places all of the risk on the contractor and infrastructure owners should take some of the risk.”

He told GE that a number of consultants were asked to develop GBR 0 by HS2 ahead of the hybrid bill. “GBR 0 does not exist in any guidelines for use of GBRs and was a concept developed by HS2,” he said. “It is essentially a GBR nothing.”

HS2 East Midlands proposals get even worse

How diesel is my valley

Following a ‘rigorous procurement process’, Welsh government first minister Carwyn Jones today announced that Keolis Amey had been contracted to operate and develop the Wales and Borders rail service, including the future ‘South Wales Metro’, working in partnership with Transport for Wales.

In February 2018, UK government rail minister Jo Johnson claimed that ‘all diesel trains should be scrapped by 2040’, or somesuch.

However, the Welsh government intends to spend hundreds of millions of pounds on new-build diesel trains, with many being ‘built’ at the new CAF factory in South Wales.

Exactly how much of the South Wales and Valley lines electrification has been binned, remains unclear. It seems more than likely that remanufacturing off-lease electric trains from the UK rolling stock glut would be cheaper than acquiring large numbers of new diesels, allow more track to be electrified, and create more Welsh and UK jobs.