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

The original plan was to have 18 trains running every hour in each direction between London and Birmingham [0]. This is tube frequency, and very difficult to do. Therefore the specs and designs were quite expensive. But however sophisticated (or not) the trains where, a _lot_ of money is needed to buy out property holders and construction.

However, this is a complete paradigm shift in the way of travel. This would have made Birmingham a suburb of London, as you can just go to the train station and hop on the next train as you do if you were to travel from anywhere within London.

The newspapers kept reporting the "faster" travel times which only shaves off "a few minutes" for a huge amount of money. But that was not the point. The point was capacity through frequency.

Over the years, this has been watered down. Now still a huge amount of money is spent on property buyouts and nature preservation / protection (the same higher frequency trains would have needed as well), on a marginally better service.

It seems to me (maybe thats wrong) that a lot of the fancy tech that is needed for increasing frequency could be had at relatively low extra cost, because there is this high base budget that needs to be spent whatever the performance of this new rail-line. So now HS2 is the worst of both worlds: expensive works delivering only a small improvement.

[0]: https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/5a82b56740f0b...

Thats a normal Shinkansen fregvency on busier stations - saw departures every 3 minutes in Hiroshima station. :)

I did not know that they have such a high frequency. Thats amazing.

I think I heard somewhere that the rail operator(s?) in Japan (like Hong Kong) own a lot of real-estate close to the stations. Therefore they have a high incentive to provide an effective service, because it props up property prices. In the same time the property prices can be used to fund public infrastructure.

This is something else that the UK could learn from other countries. Because by just operating trains it is hard to make back the money needed to build and maintain the infrastructure. Its almost like the inverse of the tragedy of the commons, where instead of externalising costs, the UK is externalising the profits of these works.