UK Rail is a money pit destroying prosperity and enforcing London's dominance to the detriment of the rest of the country.
This I suspect is going to be a very unpopular post because everyone loves trains. But…
Here’s a chart from wheredoesitallgo.org It’s a detailed breakdown of the UK Transport Budget for 2025/6.
According to the chart 63% of the entire budget gets spent on rail. Most of it as a continual annual liability to support the current rail infrastructure and attempt to make tickets somewhat less than prohibitively expensive.
Actually the amount spent on rail is £3 Billion more than shown here. The missing £3 billion is hidden in budgets to “Local Councils” and “Devolved Governments”
A significant amount of the budget is being spent on the development of HS2. That is the building and commissioning of a new rail line from London to Birmingham.
In fact the annual amount being spent on HS2 alone is just short of the entire budget used to maintain and upgrade Britain’s Motorways and major roads (The Strategic Road Network or SRN)
The total amount spent on Rail is just less than four times that spent on the Strategic Road Network (see National Highways ALB in the chart). So it would be reasonable for you to expect that the number of passengers travelling by rail would far exceed the number travelling on the Strategic Road Network.
But if you did think that was the case or even if you thought they would be somewhat similar, you would be wrong. And by wrong, I mean wrong in Spades.
Just 8% of passengers travel by rail. Meanwhile 34% travel on the Strategic Road Network. About 50% of all passengers travel on roads maintained by local councils
In total ten times as many passengers travel by road (of all types) than by rail.
Four times as many passengers travel on the SRN than travel by rail. Yet the SRN gets just one quarter of the money from the transport budget to that lavished on Rail.
The net result of this is that each passenger on the railway on average gets around 16 times the amount spent on them from the Transport Budget than does a passenger on (say) a motorway travelling in either a car or an National Express coach..
So Where it all Get Spent?
Even though each railway passenger gets about 16 times the spend than a road passenger gets, surely with all the talk of levelling up, it means that a great deal of that money is spent up North?
Sadly: No.
Most of that money is spent in and around London. 70% of all rail journeys are focused on London. Of that 70%, almost all (88%) is commuter traffic. The net result is that 60% of all rail journeys in the UK are accounted for by London commuters. Just 10% of all UK rail journeys are inter-city.
At the end of the day, non London rail passenger traffic accounts for barely 3% of the total passenger traffic on road and rail in the UK.
That’s how things stand. Nothing is getting better.
Governments of all colours have been obsessed with rail. While the Strategic Road network languishes we have shovelled money into one gold plated scheme after another. The latest debacle is HS2.
Most of the Transport Budget in in reality little more a hidden subsidy scheme for London firms and their employees. They get the Lions share of the budget. While the rest of the country gets the table scrapings.
This can’t (or rather shouldn’t) go on.
In another post (or two - TBD aka in the "future") I’ll deal with HS2 (and rail freight traffic) and how it will make little difference to the North but will in essence act as yet another London transport subsidy for London businesses and their commuters. I’ll also detail how much the subsidy comes to per commuter and how this destroys prosperity, development and job opportunities in the North and regions.
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