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...

>This would have made Birmingham a suburb of London, as you can just go to the train station and hop on the next train

At the moment you can just pop to Euston and jump on a train, a few per hour, taking 1hr18m. The problem for most people though is, were I to do so now, a single is £94 which is quite steep for most people. In actual london suburbs you can hop on a train which takes like 20-60 mins and the big difference is the fare is more like £5.

If the designers were building what the customers want I think they'd go for something cheaper. The design seems to suffer from it being government money so it's free so what's another £50bn?

The £100m bat cover is quite impressive https://archive.ph/HLQD0 They reasoned there are bats nearby and they might fly into the trains, I guess bats not being very good at hearing things coming, and so better build a roof over the tracks if any may be around.