Britain is building one of the world’s most expensive railways

What they needed was another line to relieve congestion on the WCML. But it needn't have been High Speed Rail. HSR is too expensive and impractical. Regular Rail was sufficient. The French call their HSR "debt on wheels".

Regular rail is ruinously expensive in this country too, East West Rail, which is an unelectrified <100mph railway, is probably going to end up costing in the region of £10bn and take twenty years to build.

Even local tram projects with distances in the single digits can cost hundreds of millions of pounds now, it's ludicrous.

It's almost like the target speed of the line isn't the problem.