Roland Perry wrote:
In message
-sept
ember.org, at 20:27:59 on Tue, 26 Apr 2016, Recliner
remarked:

I don't believe that absurdly low cost figure. In 1992 terms, the cost of
the full Piccadilly line extension, including the four stations, was
probably well over £250m, maybe closer to £500m.

If you don't accept the contemporaneous figure of £26m build cost when
it opened, then other discussion is futile. Can you come up with a
better figure from the archives - if you do we can resume talking about
the return on investment.

As you well know, it wasn't a contemporaneous figure. It was an absurdly
low estimate, from an aviation magazine, from years earlier, that was not
only many times too small for even the original simple 1977 extension, but
also couldn't have taken into account the eventual scope of the project,
with four stations rather than two, and the extended tunnels to T4 and T5.


Building those extensions in three stages also pushed up the costs, with
the junctions for the T4 and T5 lines having to be added years later. The
T4 loop is also longer than it needs to be, as it was originally planned to
include the T5 station on it. Those all push up the costs way beyond the
original 1970's project, let alone wildly optimistic 1960s guesses.

So we have no contemporaneous figure, and I can't find any on the web (it's
hard to find documents and contemporary news reports on the web from so
long before there was a web).

So I have used the next best thing, the costs of three other underground
London railways built slightly later, to get a ballpark figure of around
£1.5bn. Even if projects were cheaper in real terms in the 1970s, the total
won't have been much below £1bn in 2000 terms.

However, even the 1960s Victoria line cost £7m per mile in 1960s money,
which shows just how low that £26m is. Even if the Picc extension was as
cheap to build per mile as the mid 1960s Victoria line, that would still be
close to £80m per mile in 2000 money, which would make the cost somewhere
north of £600m in 2000 money terms.

See
http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/4934f...#axzz470nUlC5w

So, however you calculate it, the cost in 2000 money terms is somewhere in
the £0.6 to £1.5m range. As we don't have a better figure, let's simplify
the sums and assume it was in the £1bn bracket, again in 2000 money.

Now try and tell us that the fares income will ever pay back that cost.