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

I suspect over-engineering and being allowed to generally spunk money up the wall was the main culprit.

The £100m bat shed isn't a sign to me of over-zealous environmentalists, it's a sign that the project was mismanaged because there wasn't enough pushback on spunking £100m up the wall with a mindset of "oh well, it's a big project, I guess £100m isn't much in the scheme of a project in the tens-of-billions things!.

> The £100m bat shed isn't a sign to me of over-zealous environmentalists, it's a sign that the project was mismanaged because there wasn't enough pushback on spunking £100m up the wall with a mindset of "oh well, it's a big project, I guess £100m isn't much in the scheme of a project in the tens-of-billions things!.

The "£100m bat shed" is in the news precisely because the chair of HS2 brought it up. The point they're making is that something as fairly straightforward as an environmental protection structure is seized upon by a myriad of competing interests, all with their own demands and ability to block progress, which ultimately makes everything hugely expensive.

HS2 may well have a cost laissez-faire problem, but the bat shed is not evidence of it.

Unnecessarily high speeds to show up the Continental duffers raised costs exponentially, then every Tory rural constituency claiming the line would disfigure their pristine arcadia had to be appeased with hugely expensive tunnels. But HS2 Ltd was also incredibly mismanaged. They made sure to rule out the manager of HS1 (successfully delivered under budget) as he would stop the gravy train (pun intended).

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/hs2-rishi-sun...

This was confirmed independently to me by a fellow alumni who worked on the project.