Why has High Speed rail (HS2) gone so badly wrong (over budget and late)?

Rail Engineer here - 1) ***HS2 is, far less of a standard rail project, in reality it is the biggest civil engineering project since the Channel Tunnel -*** The UK hasn't done any rail jobs on the scale of HS2 since the year started with a 18xx. Even the Channel Tunnel wasn't this massive and, vitally, the Euro tunnel was underwater which is difficult, but it didn't have to deal with existing, habited areas. Tunnelling is throwing money in a hole, but more and more of it is needed to do the job, can't build a railway flat and straight without them, the cost of the civil engineering was vastly kept down in bids. Leads to 2) ***All bids are lies*** I am very willing to bet that I know more about my industry than any single member of the Politicians who would have been involved in agreeing to the bid. All major construction/rail firms are in competition with each other and the quickest way to get major projects is to project a nice PowerPoint with the costs being the once in a lifetime, right first time projects cost figure. They are essentially impossible, but politicians who are interested in cheap over realistic take the bait Every. Single. Time. Every major project, especially with public money, costs more than it said it would because they always go for the lowest bid, ignoring reality at every step. You can't build through prime London real estate, nor the landed classes estates in the midlands, without having to pay them out the arse every single meter of it. You also can't trust a firm that needs your work to make profits 3) ***The passing of time increases costs in every way.*** There are over 100 consultants on HS2 that I imagine cost about £2-4k per day, then their assistants, lower level workers too, delays to anything means they're all still on the payroll, so staff costs for a project not progressing increase. Throw in inflation, cost of materials, increase in land values needed in Compulsory Purchase Orders etc etc, the cost of doing the work goes up rapidly which added to the lies of the original cost estimates mean budgets, realistically, mean nothing. The bleeding has started and is only going to get worse. Add in particularly high levels of inflation (materials, equipment, wages, property price etc) as well as increases in the costs of borrowing to do the work, you're fucked. 4) ***The b******leeding is really, really hard to stop*** Say, you've started a tunnel between 2 sections and one firm is in financial issues, or a stream of particularly difficult underground terrain is discovered to be much harder to get through, then you are now at the ransom of the people who can get in and fix it. They weren't in your original budget, already bleeding out cash, to get in and fix it. They all come with their own planning teams, need to get equipment and their people in, resources to locations etc - it's never as easy and the old engineer with a hammer to a ship's engine tale. So, given the project is bleeding cash, the easy solution is to hack the limb that is bleeding off and cauterize the wound - e.g. bye bye all you lot after Birmingham. Which means that you will have something to show, but the actual point of the project is gone. Birmingham to London, especially if you're stopping at O-A-C rather than Euston, isn't going to be much faster than it is presently. 5) ***The entire HS2 project was flawed from the off*** I work in Rail Systems, have done for 14 years, this project was stupid from the off. England is small, HS2's notion of meaning "work in Manchester, Party in London, Live in Birmingham" was a solution to a problem no one had. Yes, it is a pain in the arse occasionally if you're going from Manchester to London, but 3 hours isn't the end of the world. If you're actually a billy-big-bollocks type, fly. Driving works if you need to take equipment/loads, but a 3hr train isn't the problem. Crossrail, which a lot of my northern brethren bemoan, not because of its use but that it cost more than the upgrade of the Trans Pennine upgrade that the north has needed for 50 odd years, was a decent use of money in the end, because what you need is better connections in regions. The catchphrase should be "Live in Leeds, Work in Manchester 2 days a week, get home in less than 1hr so you can party with your mates back home". If the cancelled HS2 money went to doing the Trans Pennine Route Upgrades faster and better, people wouldn't be as annoyed. But we know it won't. High speed rail need 4 major things - flat land, cheap land, preferably fuck all to exist on that land, and a burning need for high speed rail. The UK, particularly around south Manchester/Leeds, isn't flat = so tunnels = costs Land in the UK is insanely expensive = costs London, famously, is quite full of stuff and it is expensive to buy a flat, let alone space to build extra lines and stations, then farms, forests etc = costs Burning need? There isn't one, really, and there is absolutely less of one since WFH practices kicked in. If you were in the minority of people who lived within access of a HS2 station - worked in London a lot - didn't want to buy - wanted to get there fast on a train, then yeah, it did, but now it is little other than an incredibly niche need. Even in nations where high speed rail exists - the need is subsiding and many thousands of miles of it in China are basically unused, costing the Chinese Government massive amounts in subsidies and was, ultimately, wasted money. The UK needed to be realistic and say "It's going to cost the actual amount, but it can also serve as a great Kenyan project for a country that is struggling and in need of actual infrastructure improvements". But that would always be hard given that, well, we've a government on the face of it that is absolutely against that sort of thing for 14 years. So instead we were sold that it would be cheap, quick and excellent, 2 of which were impossible.