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. :)

Sort of a nit, but the parent says 18 trains/hour in each direction, which is actually 36 trains/hour total, vs 20 trains/hour if departures are every 3 minutes.

Additionally, it looks like Hiroshima station serves a few distinct lines (I see at least 3 separate branches about a mile east of the station ). So even 20 trains/hour may not be 20 trains/hour on one line.