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

Not sure if this is sarcasm.

Assuming not.... No. The premium cost on the project related to its running speed is not significant. Planning and engineering a brand new 125mph railway doesn't cost much less than planning and engineering a brand new 250mph railway.

If the ultimate goal was to bypass freight - none of which travels at 125mph - wouldn't it have been cheaper to build a new freight line and upgrade the speed and capacity of the WCML?

Or does a 75mph freight railway cost as much as a 250mph passenger railway?

A reminder that the cost of the project, even unfinished, with none of the benefits of the lines to Manchester and Leeds, is of the same order as NASA's current moonshot budget.

Performing major works on an existing line to upgrade its speed (which, given alignments might not even be possible) is probably the worst-case scenario in terms of cost and disruption.

For the WCML specifically, _we already did that_ in the form of the modernization program (early-2000s) which was over 10 years of disruption, and massively expensive.

And HS2 isn't just for freight, it's also for providing higher capacity and frequency of local stopping passenger trains. The WCML already connects the population centres, so the local stopping trains have to stay there. The thing that really kills capacity is the co-mingling of 125mph and lower speed (90/75) traffic. Remove the 125mph traffic (onto, say, a dedicated high-speed single-mode line) and you _massively_ increase capacity on the existing line.

> A reminder that the cost of the project, even unfinished, with none of the benefits of the lines to Manchester and Leeds, is of the same order as NASA's current moonshot budget.

This is not a railway problem. This is a government problem.

The article suggests that the flexibility of route afforded by slower speeds would have reduced cost significantly.

> upgrade the speed and capacity of the WCML?

Do you really think that hasn’t already been tried. We’ve already spent billions upgrading the WCML, and endured decades of disruption (where do think the meme about bus replacement services comes from?).

There’s simply no getting away from the fact that the WCML is a hodgepodge of some of the world’s earliest rail lines glued together. Rail lines that when originally designed, steam was still the high technology, it would have been utterly inconceivable for the original builders to imagine 200mph electric trains then. The design of the WCML, from its alignment, radius of bends, size of tunnels, heights of bridges etc all reflect the century it was originally built in, which is over 200 years ago (the core part of the WCML

This is wishful thinking at best.

The route is not expensive because of speed. The route is expensive because the powerful NIMBYs wanted a huge amount of it tunnelled. No amount of mild wigglyness leeway gets around that fact.

For all the howling, I've yet to see any specifics about how and where the route could have been changed if it were only built for 125mph running, and how that would have saved any significant cost.

Well I'll only repeat what's said in the article: "Christian Wolmar told CNN Travel ... the route could have followed existing highway corridors.”

> Or does a 75mph freight railway cost as much as a 250mph passenger railway?

No, it costs more. The most expensive part of building anything in the UK, by far, is getting it through the local planning process, and as hard as that is with a sexy passenger railway that local residents can see a direct benefit from, it's much harder for a freight railway. Also freight railways need a much flatter route, which makes the route more constrained (increasing planning costs) and means more need for bridges and tunnels (increasing everything costs).