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

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61 points peutetre | 1 comments | 20 Nov 24 13:51 UTC | HN request time: 0.202s | source
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Dennip ◴[20 Nov 24 15:28 UTC] No.42194722[source]▶
Mismanagement aside, HS2 required 8000+ different permits along its route [1], as well as years of opposition and legal battles from environmental groups and NIMBYs.

This is a significant portion of the cost, huge amounts of 'green tunnels' and cuttings are being created where they are not needed.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2024/nov/07/cost-of-shed...

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Closi ◴[20 Nov 24 17:39 UTC] No.42196334[source]▶
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!.

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1. fmajid ◴[20 Nov 24 18:48 UTC] No.42196946[source]▶
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.