Why Can't We Do High Speed Rail?

[00:00:00] The Why Curve, with Phil Dobbie and Roger Hearing. Had a fast, easy train journey recently? Me neither. Almost three hours London to Manchester. Around six hours to Glasgow. And that assumes there aren't delays, driver availability issues and cancellations. The nation that invented railways can't do fast trains. HS2 has become a national and international embarrassment. Japan, Spain, France and China all seem to be able to get it right.

[00:00:26] And if you want something that's less polluting than air travel, high speed rail has to be better. So how can we turn the slow train into an express? The Why Curve. Well, it's interesting, isn't it? We invented trains and now we can't do trains. We invented football and we can't win the World Cup. You know, it's the, it seems like the things that we just can't hold on to what we had. That seems to be the way, doesn't it? Yes. Yes. Well, perhaps we need a German manager for British railways. Well, maybe. Maybe.

[00:00:54] I mean, they are good engineers, aren't they? Maybe that's what it all gets down to. Or maybe actually we need engineers making the decisions rather than, you know, rather than the accountants. Maybe that's part of the problem. Well, German trains are supposed to be fairly rubbish at the moment, I have to say. So maybe they've got similar problems. But I mean, if you look at certain places, it just works. Now, for whatever reason. I mean, China, I suppose. They care about the environment. I mean, even though it's good for the environment, they don't care about what they're destroying to build the railways. So they'll plough through anything, I guess. Yes.

[00:01:23] And you look at Spain, for example. They've got high-speed trains into Madrid. But I mean, there's not a lot in the middle of Spain, is there? So it's easy to drive high-speed rail quickly into places where people don't live. But we've got the problem with quite a densely populated country. And we are very concerned about lesser spotted frogs or, you know, the wildlife component of it all. Plus, you know, you might... You're getting on your environment. And we might hit some Roman remains along the way as well.

[00:01:52] It's very difficult to build anything in this country, isn't it? It is. It is. And we've certainly made clear that that's the case with HS2. But anyway, I mean, high-speed rail is necessary, though. I mean, it is kind of one of the things we do need to do. Let's find out why we can't and why other people can. And talk to Christian Wilmar. He's a well-known journalist, of course, railway historian, and author of a new book, in fact, called Fast Track, The Extraordinary Story of High-Speed Rail. And he joins us now. So, Christian, I mean, let's not revisit old wounds unless we can do it very, very quickly.

[00:02:20] As to, you know, the HS2, what do you think went wrong? Was the plan over-engineered, for example? Were we just expecting too much? Or is it just because we've got so much that gets in the way of building a big engineering project in this country, through whether it's concerns about the environment or whether it's just, you know, stuff just costs too much or we do it too slowly? What's actually gone wrong? No, I suppose it's all of those things and much more.

[00:02:47] I think essentially, first of all, it was rushed at the beginning, where they set out the route very quickly without much kind of thought. And one of the things, it went westwards because it was going to connect with Heathrow Airport. And in fact, it never did. And there were definitely other routes that could have been taken. But instead, they go through the middle of the Chilterns,

[00:03:12] where there's plenty of kind of angry Nimbys who ensured that it had to be put in tunnels and on embankments and viaducts and all that. And that added enormously to the cost. And then there's the basics of project management and procurement and the contracts, all of which are kind of wrong and badly kind of designed.

[00:03:40] And there's the fact that the government never really got behind it. You know, they certainly under the Tories, but even this early Starmer period, they never really kind of took a great interest in this, even though it was costing several billion and now seven billion a year. And there was nobody saying, hey, what's going on here? Let's have a look at this. Why are you spending more than 100 million pounds on a bat tunnel,

[00:04:10] which was absolutely insane? So it was a mixture of government indifference, bad contracts, a rushed process to get buildings started before the design had been done, a lack of leadership and lots of other factors as well. But no other project in the world. Just tell me, I didn't hear about the bat tunnel. So just I'm intrigued by that. So what do we do?

[00:04:40] The bat tunnel is illustrative of actually everything that is wrong with it. So there was a worry that there would be some bats. There was a bat kind of nesting place next to the line kind of about halfway up. And they said, oh, God, there's bats. And so they then devised 20 different ways in which you could mitigate the risk. Now, we don't know whether bats actually, you know, have very good senses and whether they would really kind of be hit by the trains.

[00:05:10] And there's just a few hundred bats here. It was quite a rare species, but not kind of, you know, completely kind of like. And it's possible they'd move somewhere else if the train started. And it's possible they'd all bugger off. I was going to say, it was part of the debate, you know, was that this was this was an excessively badly managed plan. But I remember when it was all being debated right at the beginning.

[00:05:33] There was you said the government didn't really get behind it because I think a lot of people felt, is it actually something that we need to spend that much money on? So the question, I suppose, given, you know, you've looked at high speed rail, does Britain need high speed rail for the kind of costs it would involve? Can I finish about the bat tunnel? Sorry. Yes, please just finish that. Yeah, yeah. I feel as though I feel as though you were cut off in the bat prime. All right. Last bit of bat tunneling. I think it's very important. Go on then.

[00:05:58] It's very important to finish about the bat tunnel because it's illustrative of everything that's gone wrong. So they come up with 20 different ideas to sort this bat tunnel out. And they're all rejected by Environment England or whatever the agency is called. And they say, no, no, we can't risk these bats. And so then they decide to put this covering over it.

[00:06:19] But for a kilometre of kind of flimsy tunnel, it's costing 100 million pounds and more than that, actually. But nobody is there to say, hold on a sec. This is insane. You can build kind of, you know, two or three new primary schools for 100 million pounds. What on earth are you thinking of? Just go away and find us something that either mitigates this or we're going to ignore these bloody bats. Right. And and nobody did that.

[00:06:48] So they spend 100 million pounds on an artifact that probably they never need. So, yes. OK, to get back to your question. Did we need did we need one? Well, we needed extra capacity between London and Birmingham. But that could have been done in various ways. And certainly we needed maybe a faster trains up to the north. But, you know, we connect Manchester and Leeds around two hours from London already. You know, it's a pretty good service.

[00:07:17] I mean, Glasgow is four hours and four hours. But, you know, it's not a disastrous length distance time rather. So do you really kind of need this kind of high speed line? No, you might need more capacity, but it doesn't necessarily need to be at 300 kilometres per hour. So if you've got if you want more capacity. So there's places where and obviously to get the capacity, you've got to have the ability for more trains to go more often or longer trains to go more often.

[00:07:44] So the thing that would stop that happening would be some trains going slow, like stopper trains online. So they're being used by express trains. Yeah. So there's places where, you know, you only have a double track and it might be handy to have four tracks at those places. That's right. That's right. And there would have been ways of kind of expanding the capacity on the existing West Coast lane line. Now, some of the train advocates said, no, no, no, we absolutely needed a new line.

[00:08:11] But then you could have boosted that there's already actually two and a half lines to Birmingham between London and Birmingham. You could have boosted the services that ran out of Marilabarion. You could have kind of tried to speed up that line. There might have been other ways of doing it. And certainly all of them would have cost less than 100 billion pounds. Yes. And the idea that you. And without upsetting the bats. Exactly. The bats would have to be taken into account. But what you're saying then, Christian, is that we don't actually.

[00:08:40] We don't. If someone said, right, we need a bullet train between London and Glasgow, you'd say, actually, we don't. The Japanese maybe do. Maybe the Chinese do. But we don't. I would have said that, yes, it would be useful to have some extra capacity. But maybe one of the ways would have been to create a freight line that there was an idea for this. Take all the freight off the railways and then you create extra of existing railways, create a new freight line. That might have been a way of doing it.

[00:09:09] There might have been all sorts of ways. And of course, they only predicted the high demand by saying, well, it's been growing up one or two percent over the last few years. So it's probably going to grow up one or two percent in future years. And now we've got things like we're doing at the moment, Zoom calls that, you know, don't obviate the need for people to travel so much. So who knows what the demand really is going to be in 2040? Do we really need all these extra trades? They're very nice to have.

[00:09:40] But if they can't be delivered at a reasonable cost, maybe we didn't need them. But for a Western democracy, we do have this more than almost any other country, this concentration of wealth in the southeast of England. And the only way you're going to get that is for faster transportation across the whole country so that people can be doing business. So you could live in the north and work in the south or you could set up a business in the north that's dependent on a business in the south. And you want to have those face to face meetings.

[00:10:08] For that, you need decent connectivity. And it needs to be at a price you can afford as well, because that's the other aspect out of all of this. Rail fares, for whatever reason in this country, are way more expensive than they are in Europe or almost anywhere else in the world, I'd suggest. I've always argued that rather than quick connections to London, what you really needed and should be building, and they are to some extent,

[00:10:32] would be a kind of network in the north that connected all their cities, you know, Liverpool, Hull, Newcastle, Leeds, Manchester, whatever, connect them all very with high speed or fast, not necessarily high speed, but fast trains that were electrified, modern, sleek,

[00:10:55] and create a kind of region out of the north that was well interconnected that might rival London as a kind of powerhouse. I don't think you really needed more connections with London because there already were adequate connections with London. And anyway, that might just mean that London benefits.

[00:11:14] Yeah. And the point with Japan and places like that, I mean, Japan, Christian, as you know, it's a similar sort of size of country and similar in terms of, I suppose, in terms of development. And yet they have these high speed trains very much and they very much need them. It's not entirely similar.

[00:11:33] A, it's bigger, it's bigger, more than 100 million, but also most of the population is concentrated on lowlands kind of running between really Tokyo and Osaka and kind of further north. And that is absolutely perfect territory for busy railway services.

[00:12:01] I mean, I went there, I was astonished at the number of high speed trains, sometimes 70 or 80 a day running, running between Tokyo and Osaka, you know, really coming every five minutes, you know, another high speed train. I mean, it was just extraordinary and they're all kind of well used. And we don't have that kind of intensity of usage.

[00:12:26] But we do have a busy, a busy, efficient network that, you know, connects our main towns and cities. It just needed some extra capacity, not necessarily the new line. But I mean, they are also very expensive. I don't know what they're like in Japan, but I mean, getting, you know, London to Manchester is not a cheap trip. And if you and it is, if you it is, if you buy an off peak, off peak service, you know, it can be reasonably cheap.

[00:12:54] You know, it's just if you travel at peak times, it is expensive. And that is something I think desperately need to change. But it's a whole different subject. I think you should have a different kind of fare system that isn't so calibrated towards very expensive peak fares and very cheap. But presumably, I mean, we no longer live in that world. We no longer live in a world where lots of business people jump on a train at eight o'clock for a ten o'clock meeting in Manchester because they don't bother with that anymore.

[00:13:22] The trains are still busy, though, up north, aren't they? Even though you say, well, you know, perhaps we don't need it, need any more. When we started talking about capacity, the trains are crampacked. And if you think, well, OK, I can't be bothered with that. It's too expensive. And I don't want to stand up for however many hours, three hours, three and a half hours. So I'm going to drive. And then you find that you sit on the M6 for three hours. So you might as well have taken the train. I'm not arguing that there shouldn't be more capacity. I think probably they did need some capacity.

[00:13:48] I think it's probably more marginal than they might have predicted. And also there would have been other ways of doing it other than building a whole new life. But if you've got more capacity, then presumably more people travelling. I mean, obviously the set cost is the cost of building the thing. But if you've got more people travelling along it, then that would bring the cost down, wouldn't it? Presumably we might get cheaper railfares out of it. You're never going to pack a hundred billion out of a fare box.

[00:14:18] But also, no. I mean, I think that, you know, operationally it will still be quite expensive. And, you know, they will try and recoup some of this through the fares. The fares on the one high-speed line we have, HS1, are already three pounds more expensive than the normal fares by the slower railways because they try to recoup some of the cost of that. I think that's bonkers. But that's the way that the Treasury insists on doing it.

[00:14:46] You mentioned, obviously, that Japan is different and it doesn't work the same way. But somewhere like Spain, maybe, you know, European economic competitor of ours, they have incredibly good high-speed trains. They had an accident recently, but they're pretty good. Still over fairly flat land, though, isn't it? No, no, not at all. No, I mean, the middle is quite flat, but there's some hilly areas. But, no, I mean, they have an absolutely brilliant system.

[00:15:14] And as my book explains at some length and kind of lords the Spanish experience, they did it by having a national plan. So they built this line between Madrid and Seville, which is not the busiest. The busiest is obviously Madrid and Barcelona. But they built this line between Madrid and Seville for the 1992 Seville exposition, world kind of exposition thing. And they then said, oh, well, this is working quite well.

[00:15:44] We'll use this model. We'll use the same design of how the tracks are laid. We'll use the same designs of stations. We'll use the same contractors, by and large, to build this. And we'll have a rolling program of building lines across Spain. And we're going to end up with nearly 4,000 kilometers built in the space of about 30 years, 35 years. And it's absolutely fantastic.

[00:16:12] It's a national network that had all the different political parties behind it. They fought the whole idea through as a national strategy. And they've succeeded in, you know, really not only having a modern railway system, and that railway system was particularly bad before, but actually changing the image of Spain, as you guys have just proved by kind of saying, God, they've got a wonderful system. Well, couldn't we do something like that?

[00:16:41] Wouldn't that be possible for us? And it's a similar size country. Don't make me cry. I mean, you're making me weak. We just, we made a half-hearted attempt at this. We were going to have a, you know, remember the original HS2 idea was to go to Leeds and possibly beyond. It was to go to Manchester on the other side.

[00:17:03] We've ended up with what I've called the Acton to Aston Shuttle, which is a 130-mile line between West London somewhere, Old Oak Common, and the edge of Birmingham, Birmingham Curzon Street, and at a cost that was more than, about three times more than the original cost of the whole network that we proposed.

[00:17:27] So, you know, we have completely messed this up in a way that is just embarrassing for this nation. So isn't it a white elephant, the fact that it goes from somewhere no one wants to go from to somewhere no one wants to go to? I mean, is there, I mean, is it, you know, whereas you can go from central London to central Birmingham, and it would be quicker probably by the time you'd actually try to get out to those stations. So is it just a white elephant? Is it, is the whole thing just going to fold?

[00:17:52] I would argue that it will be, but unless they complete it through to Euston, which they are boring the tunnels, but they haven't yet kind of devised a design for Euston Station. And Curzon Street in Birmingham is about a mile from New Street. And there is going to be a tram system there. But, you know, I go to, I go to Birmingham for various things in business, but I might go to Wolverhampton, I might go to Solihal or something.

[00:18:20] And so I'll definitely go to New Street and then change trains there. Whereas go, go to Curzon Street and then taking a tram and then taking another train. Too much hassle. So, yes, it is going to be something of a white elephant, unless they do eventually restore the kind of worst cut they made, which was Richie Sunak in that famous speech at the 2023 conference, where he said, oh, we're going to cancel the train.

[00:18:49] And actually the train was going to come to Manchester, but we were in Manchester now, but we're going to cancel the train. I was extraordinary that he thought this was a kind of popular thing to do. I mean, that was a big mistake. Yeah. Like a permanent bus replacing train from Birmingham to Manchester. That's that sort of approach. But the way it's funded in the UK versus what was happening in Spain, they got pretty good trains in Italy as well, I remember. They do.

[00:19:18] Is that all just, did the government just go for it and just say, yes, we're going to do it? Or did they get... In a word, yes. Look, these projects have never got much private money. The one place they tried having private money was in Taiwan, where they went with some public-private partnership. And eventually they ended up bailing out the private company because just the cost is just too much. And it just doesn't work, right? So essentially, you know, this is government projects

[00:19:47] that have to be funded by the state. And therefore, you have to really have a government that's confident that they want to do it, know what they're doing, why they're doing it, what its purpose is, how quickly they're going to do it and put the finances behind it all the way through. So at the moment, you know, they have to bid for money every year or two. In fact, now, actually, the government has at last given them a budget

[00:20:17] for the rest of this term of government. But, you know, they didn't do that before. So you never knew where the money was going to come from and that creates uncertainty and that increases costs. You know, we never got behind this project properly. And now it's really, it's going to cost more than £100 billion for something that is hardly worthwhile. And yet we were the country that sort of invented all this. I mean, you know, we began the whole process of putting in railways. So, I mean, what has changed? Is it something, a culture that doesn't like trains anymore?

[00:20:46] I mean, heaven knows we use them a lot. I think that the other project, and it's interesting that the two projects that I outline that have gone wrong are in the United States and the United Kingdom. And I think in both cases, I mean, they're rather different because the United States doesn't have a problem. Well, tell us about the US one, because I don't think we know about that. Right. They don't travel by train very much there, do they? Exactly. It's different because the United States doesn't really have a national rail network.

[00:21:15] It has a few trains that trundle around. There's tourist trains around the country, and it has the Northeast Corridor, which has a reasonable train service. But it doesn't really have a rail network. So in a way, it's rather different. The California High Speed Project was supposed to run between Los Angeles and San Francisco. But at the moment, they're only building the middle bit, which is between a town called Merced, which has a population of around 50,000, and a town called Bakersfield,

[00:21:45] which had a population of about 10 times that, 500,000. So they're going to end up with, I think, it's about 150 miles a line between two completely unknown towns because they haven't worked out a route to get through the hills through to San Francisco or the hills through to Los Angeles. And they have spent, again, just the same sort of money that we have. And it's the same. The thing that unites these two failed schemes

[00:22:13] is that the governments have never got behind it, that they haven't really had an idea of what they're trying to do and why. And they haven't kind of ever said, right, we're doing this. It's going to happen. Come up May. And we're going to ensure that we have the means to do it and finish it. And in both these cases, they've stuttered. Presumably, though, there was a cost-benefit analysis of some sort

[00:22:41] for a project of this size of some sort would have been done, not just looking at what the payback is going to be in terms of, you know, the fares that are going to be paid by people travelling, like a commercial cost-benefit analysis, but also like an economic cost-benefit analysis. What's it going to do to the broader economy? Presumably, there were numbers flung onto a spreadsheet at the beginning to try and justify all this, weren't they? Well, in the UK, there were certainly some numbers around this,

[00:23:07] but I think the methodology for this working out major projects is deeply flawed. And actually, they haven't really redone the cost-benefit analysis on the basis of what it's actually costing and what the benefits really will be, given that it's a much truncated service, because they know that it would come out so badly that it would be an embarrassment.

[00:23:36] I think the benefit-cost ratio is probably something like 0.3 or 0.4, something. So in other words, for every pound you spend, you're going to get 30p or 40p in benefits. And so they've actually basically stopped doing them because it's so bad. In the United States, they've similarly done such analysis. But again, because the cost of sword so much,

[00:24:05] the benefit-to-cost ratio will be very low. Well, I mean, why would you do it then if that was the case? Why would you even entertain that? Well, in the UK, and to a great extent in the US, once you put down a large amount of the structure, so we have a 10-mile tunnel underneath the Chilterns, as if the Chilterns needed a 10-mile tunnel. It's insane. It takes you through the Alps, 10 miles.

[00:24:35] They've got a 10-mile tunnel. They've got a 2-mile viaduct. They've got several other tunnels, quite long tunnels, which are largely completed. You can't just then abandon that. I just, you know, not least, because according to analysis, you'd have to restore the territory to what it was before because you got compulsory purchase orders on the basis that this would be a railway and not a bunch of abandoned tunnels.

[00:25:05] So growing up. And bat tunnels as well. Yeah, well, actually, that 10-mile tunnel, the bat, you know, long, dark space, the bats are going to be in there, aren't they? You're going to have a bat problem. Yeah, not much to eat in there. But anyway, yes, there was another bat. A few British ale sandwiches thrown out windows. You never know. Yeah, you can't really do that. So they have to now complete it. I mean, they are between a rock and a hard place. I do recognise that.

[00:25:33] That whatever they do, it's going to get kind of negative publicity. But in a way, they deserve it. But do you know what? People, but the Elizabeth line had a lot of bad publicity until, oh, because it was very expensive and it was, but... The Elizabeth line is on a different level to this. I mean, I wrote a book on the Elizabeth line called The Crosswell Story and it's a different level. So originally it was really cost... But now my point is, everyone loves it now, though. So I'm just wondering whether... Yeah, but it was never that dire, right?

[00:26:03] It was the original cost of about $14 billion. It ended up costing about $19 billion. So that's kind of maybe 25%, 30% kind of increase. And some of that is inflation. And it was three years late, right? Okay. So it was going to open in 2018. It opened eventually in 22, mid-22. And the Queen was still alive, which was good. And it had a real purpose. We always knew what it was for.

[00:26:32] It was to kind of relieve the underground and get lots of people through London with a big tunnel. It's a fantastic service. The stations are absolutely wonderful. There's no doubt that it's utterly worthwhile. Compare that with high-speed light, where we don't really know. Was it for capacity? Was it for speed? Is it going to many destinations? No.

[00:27:00] Has it got any real USP? Well, not really, because there's already quite good services between London and Birmingham. So, you know, what's it all about? And then the cost factor has gone from, say, generously, 30 billion original costs to 100 billion costs. Now, that's three times as opposed to 25%. So it's a completely different scale. So is this all down to poor management, essentially?

[00:27:26] Poor management, lack of vision, lack of political will to do it. I mean, or is it are we just unable to do this? I mean, it sounds like the Elizabeth line could work. Or is it that we just don't need it, which seems to be what you're saying? I think it's partly all those things. But I think that the major factors are the lack of vision or strategic thinking

[00:27:53] and the very poor project management and the lack of attention. There was one minister called Andrew Stevenson under the Tories who actually took an interest in it when he was in charge of it. And he actually was very diligent about it and kind of, you know, made the right noises and badgered them and kind of managed to get some of the costs down and stuff because he was paying attention.

[00:28:19] But all the other, you know, did Grant Shapps ever mention HS2? Barely, even though, you know, it was under his watch. I mean, all these Tory ministers just absolutely ignored what was going on and didn't bother about it at all. And I think that that that was the big cost. Boris Johnson loved the idea. Grand Roger, you know, you know, building a, you know, you know, I might get to cut the ribbon.

[00:28:46] Of course, he hoped to be in power for 10 years and it would be finished by then. Of course, both Boris Johnson and HS2 have gone wrong. But, you know, he couldn't even get his garden bridge over the Thames, could he? So, you know, building nature. Or an airport in the Thames estuary or, you know, all sorts of other Borisonian ideas. But so, you know, it could have been very different. If they'd started off as a project knowing what they were going to do,

[00:29:16] worked it out a bit more slowly, started work on it slowly. I must say the planning process is flawed here because it was a three-year hearing in the House of Parliament, you know, looking at the whole thing line by line. And then all these people coming along and saying, oh, you can't love this in our back garden. You have to build a tunnel. And they'll just say, oh, OK, because they didn't have to pay for the tunnel. So that process is also completely hopeless and has been tidied up by the government to some extent.

[00:29:45] So looking forward now, Christian, I mean, what's going to happen? Will Britain ever have a functioning high-speed rail system that does any good? Or is it just simply a white elephant, park it over there, forget about it, and just concentrate, as you say, on perhaps local systems? The trouble is that it's the – I mean, I'm 76. I'm not going to make it, right? I mean, because it's unlikely to be finished before 2039.

[00:30:12] I mean, they've given a kind of range between 36 and 39. But I understand it's going to really be 39. By which time I'll be 90, you know? So I might dodder onto it with two sticks and a wheelchair. But, you know, it's difficult to then conceive, well, they've got to get through to Euston. They've got to get through to Manchester to make it useful. Well, you know, how are they going to do that? Who's going to pay for that? And will they do it by 2045 or something?

[00:30:41] So it's so far off. Even you younger guys might not be with us anymore. Every possibility. Gosh. Yeah. So my mum's 91 or 92, so she's doing all right. So, you know. But she's definitely not going to see it. Absolutely. But then she doesn't go out, so that doesn't really matter too much for her. But, I mean, it's just – I'm just wondering why we even need to. I mean, if it's – I mean, I love the idea of fast trains. I love getting on a – you know.

[00:31:09] And I love the idea that we have a modern transport network. And I think, you know, Boris liked it because it would portray Britain as a modern country with a bright future. And I think that's how people attach to projects like this. It becomes a civil engineering project, which could have some national pride sitting behind it. But we never had that, did we? And as you say, no one was talking it up. No one was bigging it up because – That's right. Maybe it was an embarrassment because it was costing too much or we just didn't see it.

[00:31:39] You know, maybe trains aren't sexy anymore. I know you're absolutely fixated with them. No, no, they are. They're absolutely – no, no, no, no. That's absolutely wrong because you only have to look at all the other countries I've covered in my book, from Japan to Spain to France. You mentioned Italy. You know, they all have, you know, fantastic services. The Italian ones did not to be – the lovely thing about Italy is that it runs next to A1 motorway quite a lot. So there you are in the train kind of overtaking cars, which, as you know, in Italy go quite fast.

[00:32:09] So it's absolutely wonderful. And, of course, we haven't mentioned the kind of creme de la creme, which is China, which has built. And, you know, as I wrote a piece for the Sunday Times the week before last on this, and as I wrote at the beginning, you can understand the numbers. So, okay, I'll give you the numbers. They're 30,000 miles of line, 10,000 trains a day, 10 million people using those trains, right?

[00:32:37] And you just take those numbers. And when you go there and you see what those numbers mean, and you see, you know, half a dozen huge stations, all far bigger than any station in this country, with huge roofs and kind of, you know, modern lighting, and they're just looking absolutely wonderful. And you look at kind of, you know, hundreds of thousands of miles of line on little viaducts. So they run most of the lines on little viaducts,

[00:33:05] which kind of means it's easier to maintain and also less hassle for the local peasants and the like. And they run them incredibly efficiently. And they built all this in less than 20 years. And you just think, this is a different planet. But they didn't have to have planning permission. They didn't have to worry about bat tunnels. They didn't have to worry about any of that stuff. It's a police state. No, no. Well, you see, that's wrong, actually. I mean, yeah, they're probably not mad enough to build bat tunnels,

[00:33:35] but they do actually care about the environment. So when they had these wetlands bit kind of in the east of the country, over the Yangtze Delta or whatever, and they decide, well, we'll just build a bridge. And the bridge is 167 kilometres long. Right? And they build that so that they wouldn't damage the wetlands because if they went, they built the line for the wetlands, it would actually ruin the water flows and everything.

[00:34:05] So they build a viaduct for 167 kilometres and they plonk it down and it's finished in five years. I mean, come on. You know, yes, they do care about the environment. They do care about safety. They had one terrible crash in 2011 at a place called Wenzhou and they kill 40 odd people. And they learned from that enormously so that they're absolutely obsessed with safety. But there's no question of political... Everything about it is safety. And I went to the factories

[00:34:34] and they have rigs that test every kind of aspect of this. You know, rigs for absolutely everything. And the workers in the factory themselves are completely safe. It's a safe, clean environment. It's no good... You know, before I went, there were all these people saying, oh, China, you know, it's all slave labour and it's all they don't care about safety and, you know, blah, blah, blah. That couldn't have been more wrong. This is a modern economy. It's not the China that we think of,

[00:35:04] you know, people bicycling around Beijing. It's the Mussolini made the trains run on time thing, isn't it? If you have that kind of political ability to ignore basically anyone who objects, you can do it. Well, they didn't ignore anybody who objected. They did have, you know, problems. They did have to overcome kind of sceptics about this. I'm not saying it isn't an authoritarian state that kind of gets things done, you know, with greater ease than we ever will.

[00:35:30] But I think it's too good an excuse for us in the West to just say, oh, it's an authoritarian state. It's easier for them. There's the whole process of getting this lines built, you know, the project management, the procurement process, making sure that supplies of stuff are all in the right places, making sure that you have enough skilled labour, that you've trained enough people in universities to do this.

[00:35:58] So it's no good just to say, oh, it's China. It's too easy. Yeah, it's like the cookie cutter approach that we're talking about with Spain and having it delivered efficiently, isn't it? And I've been out of, I'm in Australia. I've been out of the country for 10 years. I've come back and there's a whole lot in Sydney, a whole load of railway lines. A lot of them underground lines have sprung up in that decade. So they've been moving fairly swiftly on that. And I saw how they were building out a line out to the northwest of Sydney.

[00:36:27] And it is largely raised in sort of low-level viaducts. Right. And it looks like they were building them by delivering the parts that are needed on the train. So a train would go to the end of the line and was basically having almost, you know, almost completed next section that was... That's a traditional way of building railways, by the way, in the old days. They used to do that a lot. They build a bit and then get a train along

[00:36:56] to bring the rest of the supplies. Well, they built it very quickly. So maybe the old ways are the best ways. And why... Yeah, yeah. So we just weren't taking the old and tried and tested technologies. Is that the problem? Yeah. Yes. I mean, one of the things they do in France is when they build a high-speed line, they build a kind of road. They just build a road and then they plonk a railway on top of it. And that's a very effective way of doing it. We haven't done that. Of course, we haven't done that. I mean, we don't seem to learn from anything. We had to have the best railway in the world,

[00:37:25] the fastest railway in the world, you know, all this Boris-Ondian boosterism that ended up actually making sure it was the most expensive railway in the world. So, Christian, as we kind of draw this to a close now, I mean, do you have no faith at all that we're ever going to get the railways right in Britain? Look, there was a guy called Mark Wild who's trying to sort this out and is now the boss of HS2 Limited. And he did sort out Crossrail and, you know, at a late stage,

[00:37:54] he arrived in 2018 and sorted it out. It took him three years. He's trying the same reset for HS2, but it's on a different scale. I mean, I think the scale overwhelms everybody on this and it shouldn't. I mean, you know, the Chinese show how you can deal with this, but, you know, we need to restart and relearn how to basically do it.

[00:38:22] And hopefully the reset, which will be completed again, I'm worried about this. It's taken nearly two years for the reset, but which will be completed in the spring of next year, might kind of point the way to how we can finish this off more quickly and more cheaply and more efficiently. But I'm not holding my breath. I'm slightly sceptical about it. And do you know when you travel on those high-speed trains in China or other parts of the world, in the carriage, it tells you how fast the train is going.

[00:38:52] And it's, you know, we maybe should be putting that on the West Coast mainline. We wouldn't be looking for it. It would be embarrassing. It would be embarrassing to see that you've only just made it up to 59 miles an hour, wouldn't it? But at least we'd know where we are. Look, I can't emphasize enough how traveling on those trains was just a revelation. I mean, there was no feeling that you're going 300 kilometers an hour. It was as smooth as anything. They were very well used. They were quite cheap because it was part of their whole,

[00:39:23] you know, they've forgotten really what communism was about. But it was part of their kind of socialist ethos to provide these trains for the people, right? So, and they want them to go everywhere. So they built 50,000 kilometers so far and they hope to build 70,000 by 2035. And there will be economic benefits for it. There's enormously, but some of them, they realize they'll never make a profit

[00:39:51] because they go to smaller towns and it costs a hell of a lot together. But that doesn't matter. It holds the country together. I mean, this is something they are enormously proud about and set a lot of store. And the people love it. I mean, the people actually love it. Of course they do. They can go and see granny kind of 200 miles away in a couple of hours. Maybe we should let the Chinese, maybe let the Chinese run HS2. Perhaps that's the future. Yeah, except that... Well, maybe there will be a time when we're... We'd be worried they put all sorts of secret devices

[00:40:20] to listen to us. We'll have Huawei build it. Yeah, they say, well, maybe in, you know, in a couple of generations' time, our grandkids will be saying how fantastic it is that we've got such a fantastic railway network here. Yes, go all the way from Old Oak Common to Curzon Street in Birmingham. In no time at all. In no time at all. Many great, great grandkids. Yeah. Christian, thank you so much for speaking to us at all this. Really appreciate your time. Pleasure. It's good value, isn't it? And he's got his own podcast as well, which is called Calling All Stations,

[00:40:50] which I haven't listened to, but I will now, because I think... Maybe he's got the answers. Yeah, maybe he's got the answers on that. But anyway, he's an entertaining talker. Now, look, people who don't need to worry about trains too much, because they've got more immediate things to worry about, are the homeless people. And there's an increasing number of people in the UK who are in that situation. Andy Burnham wants to get rid of them. How's he going to do it? Because it's been... I mean, if it was easy, we would have done it by now. Well, you would imagine, although over COVID, of course, everyone pretty much was taken off the streets. Rough sleeping kind of ceased then,

[00:41:20] but it certainly resumed in force. But the interesting thing about it is it's not as simple as just people not having somewhere to sleep. I mean, there's a lot more to it than that. And there's been a lot of writing, a lot of talking about this because of Andy Burnham's initiative to say, can we actually really do this? I mean, I remember, gosh, was it back in the late 70s when it seemed that suddenly you had cardboard cities that had never been there before in big cities. So something changed. Well, is it because we are

[00:41:48] turfing people out of mental hospitals? And that's created part of the problem, perhaps. I don't know. Because there's certainly some people who, given the option to actually stay somewhere, choose not to. I mean, you know. Well, that's the thing. It's not as simple as just finding a warm place for people to sleep. And I think it's something they're going to need to work on really hard. But it's one of the great scourges, really, of modern British society. Should it really happen in a place like Britain? It really shouldn't. It makes you feel uncomfortable, doesn't it, really? It certainly does.

[00:42:17] You feel like you're in a good position and there's people who are so downtrodden in life. But look, we will investigate that and we'll see if there's actually a solution. Not a simple one, but what are the issues that need to be tackled? The issues that Andy Burnham is going to face as he tries to tackle it next week on The Why, Kev. Yeah, that's next week. Join us for that. We'll see you then. The Why. Curve.