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Road widening scheme costs are soaring
It's not often that you have the chance to compare similar road and rail schemes. But courtesy the Highways Agency we now have the projected costs of adding a lane to each carriageway of M6 motorway between Birmingham and Manchester .
You would think it was a pretty simple piece of civil engineering. Widen the odd embankment or cutting, lay down some hard core, cover with geotextile, call up the paving machines and Robert McAlpine is your great uncle.
Rail projects are much more technical. Take the current Trent Valley four-tracking (TV4). In addition to the 12 route miles of new double track, it requires 50 miles of overhead line equipment, resignalling, 22 new bridges, two new high-speed junctions, and a major noise mitigation effort.
No wonder it is costing £350m. That makes it £14.6 million for a single mile of electrified, signalled track.
So what would a ‘single lane mile' of motorway cost on the widened M6? Well, the cost of adding an extra lane to each carriageway over 53 miles of the M6 is quoted at £2.9 billion. A new two-lane dual carriageway ‘expressway' bypassing the M6 is priced at £3.47 billion.
That makes the cost per mile of a single lane of motorway £27 million. As near as dammit that's twice the cost of rail. To cheer you up even more, I've worked out the cost per single track mile of the Channel Tunnel Rail Link (CTRL).
Despite all that expensive tunnelling, the cost of our first very high speed line works out at £38 million per single track mile. In other words a brand new high speed electric railway is only 40% more expensive than a Motorway upgrade.