Like with Hinckley and various other grand projects I'd rather we taught ourselves how to do it. Only HS2a has passed into law, b&c, HS3 and Crossrail2 are still to come.
The cost of the train can be amazing. I'd like to know what train users will say if offered the choice between 'decent seats' and a decent price.
High costs on the WCML for flexible peak fares are becase
1) The costs subsidise rail elsewhere, like regional networks in the North and Welsh Valleys
2) The price encourages people to take less busier trains
(2) falls down a bit with the hard cutoff, because there's no "shoulder peak" at Euston, meaning that 1840 is empty but the 1900 is really full, but the principle remains.
Bank holidays are always very busy, you'd think that if prices were really so high people wouldn't travel. The extra 10,000 seats an hour that HS2 provides will certainly help though.
An relative bargain compared to London-Leeds costing £113.50
No break of journey on the outbound but allowed on return.
2. The Caledonian Express also has high ticket prices, yet the service is completely shambolic.
Yes. This is also why the Tube and the NYC metro have such big problems compared to more recently built systems.
A piece of route might have been designed in the 1800s, possibly to a speed limit of 20 or 30mph, then been rationalised and 'upgraded' over the years to a higher speed, but that section of track will still carry limitations that are implied by the way it was initially designed to be, signalling may be too close together, or too far apart, junctions that are rarely used but remain for whatever reason add complexity and potential failure sites, tracks.
There are of course some physical aspects of physically old track - shorter (~100m) sections of rail joined together have a higher risk of failure than the newer techniques of long (0.5km to 1km or more) single track pieces welded together, old wooden sleepers allow track movement that can result in delays and maintenance issues, whereas relative-new concrete sleepers, and really-new split-concrete sleepers are more reliable and permit faster and more reliable train operation.
Tearing routes apart and redesigning the sections from scratch is difficult politically, so the UK's railway network tends to suffer from the fact that 99% of it was designed and built before 1880.
As a taxpayer, I would much rather the work was contracted out to the Japanese that built the Shinkansen services. But for some strange reason that seems politically unpopular.