A decade ago we build HS1, a 67 mile track between London and the Channel Tunnel, for a total of $7.6 billion ($112m / mile).

HS2 is longer but its 330 miles of tracks will cost $400m / mile.

The project costs make absolutely no sense: London is a special weird place in the UK where everything you build is twice as expensive as in the rest of the country. Considering most of HS1 was in London and most of HS2 is outside of London, this budget makes absolutely no sense.

What makes the whole thing even more insane is that the endpoints are not connected to the rest of the infrastructure. You have a 30 minute trip between HS1 and HS2. So if you're travelling from Birmingham to Paris you'll have to switch trains in London. For the money they're spending on this it's crazy that you're not getting it.

See: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-51415590

The only other thing I'd add is that Euston is easily within walking distance of St Pancras. But given all this already extraordinary cost it seems like you might as well connect St Pancras and Euston HS lines and have the odd Eurostar service run from Birmingham.

For travellers who don't know London, who have to lug around baggage and small children it's a massive pain.

It's well worth the effort to connect it. It would already be way better even if you had to switch train in one station.

Also inflation had to be taken into account when comparing projects that are decades apart.

So without knowing much about the details, it might well be that the costs are plausible to what was proposed.

The comparison of HS2 with 18 paths per hour in each direction, on an overground rail system stretching over 320 miles, running at high speed (theoretical uppper speed limit of 250mph), with the London Underground, is laughable. I could not find any references to your claim in the official documents.

The project was never about speed, but rather about increasing capacity. It was packaged and sold to the voters as shaving off some time to get from A to B, largely due to politrickery. The aim is to free up commuter, regional and freight capacity on existing lines ─ which will also have an overall impact on roads and motorway nework used by freight carriers.

https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/...

The point I was trying to make was that a comparison to HS1 without accounting for the train frequency is probably not fair.

Ah, of course, it's the 'free market' that's the solution. I mean it's complete shit in the UK, where I live, but am sure that's just an outlier. The U.S. healthcare industry is a strong proof that the private model for essential services works flawlessly and now there's Reds again running in the election campaigning for 'Medicare for All'. Outrageous.

I don't expect my point to be landing with free market Regonomists, but seriously? I mean even trains in my native country, which is generally fairly undeveloped are a lot more dependable. Trains in the UK are regularly late, cancelled, broken due to the slightest change in weather that's fairly typical of the UK, overcrowded, slow etc. etc.

Maybe it was even worse before, but if this is what 'a lot better' looks like, then the private industry has a long way to go.

I think there's plenty of room for private industry, but am not sure essential public transportation is one of them.

German trains are a lot better run, (have family there presently, so can speak to that) and while they're technically owned by a private company, the state is the single shareholder there.

Perhaps the problem was that in the UK, like in the US, there's a strong desire to underfund and underpower public programs to be able to then point to them and say how they 'don't work' - the same has been the case for the NHS as well, which btw now has huge contracts with private companies like Virgin Health, who sue and waste public funds if they don't get a contract rather than conclude that their offering simply wasn't good enough in the 'free market'.

That's besides the point that there's no such thing as a 'free market' for most people, because most of us aren't of means enough to simply pack up and leave if there's no good train/ISP... choices in our area for example, nor do most of us have the ability to start our own.

If you look at ridership graphs for the UK they were in decline for decades. There was no investment because governments thought the railways had no future. Once privatised, ridership turned around and started growing again. Now there's lots of investment again. Usage figures show the story. UK rail is btw no worse than Germany. Look at data, not anecdotes. Or if you must use anecdotes:

https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.theguardian.com/world/2018/...

Railways have trouble with reliability in most countries that aren't Switzerland (which has 2x large subsidies).

You seem to believe only ideological people could possibly believe rail is better privatised. It's the other way around. Look at the quote from the leader of one of the rail unions in the UK. He praised privatisation. It's ideology to deny the turnaround so clear in the data.