If they ever finish the fucking thing properly.

They made two classic British engineering mistakes:

Mistake A: Bundling the whole thing as one humongous engineering project and creating a single entity to deliver it.

Mistake B: Starting construction in London.

WARNING: ENGINEERING RANT AHEAD!

On Mistake A:

A single entity created for this huge megaproject makes for good political hay when raising interest and funds but that’s where the usefulness stops. What it devolves into, particularly with the UK’s rainforest-worth of planning laws and frameworks, is massively over budget and horrendously delayed.

What it should have been was a broad vision with dozens of smaller projects funded and implemented separately with constraints in place so all the individual sections line up once the whole thing is finished.

This fixes two things:

Fix 1: Breaks the scope of the project down into more manageable chunks with separate design authorities, construction contractors, and project management. So when they inevitably run into planning issues, they can be resolved much quicker through the courts and the committees because they’re dealing with 1/10 of the fucking reading material! It also keeps cost ballooning down as large projects work-hours scale logarithmically not linearly.

Fix 2: Allows them to bundle in small related upgrades that will have a more immediate effect once the smaller projects are completed.

For example, a new station section needs to be constructed for the high-speed lines. Well since you have to partially demolish the station to create new walkways, utility connections, toilets etc. why not also upgrade the passenger common areas like the departure boards, the outside areas, the retail space, the existing low-speed tracks and points that haven’t had any fucking upgrades done since steam was rolling on them!

Dozens of these smaller changes gets more local stakeholders (i.e. residents and commuters) on-side and more willing to put up with disruptions because, see Fix 1, the project won’t be as heavily delayed.

On Mistake B:

Starting in London might look to make sense at first glance since it is the largest city by both population and GDP per capita. But it means that the later stages of the project, when it inevitably gets delayed and spirals in cost, are the ones that are much more easily axed. This goes against the whole point of the project which was to shorten the commute to London from Northern Cities like Manchester, Leeds, and eventually Glasgow, Edinburgh, and Cardiff.

What we will have now is a very slightly faster journey time between Birmingham and London. If you’ve ever had the misfortune to regularly travel between Leeds/Manchester and London you’ll be aware that all of the delays and cancellations happen immediately north of Birmingham.

Birmingham to London is already well serviced whereas an upgraded route between Manchester, Leeds, and Birmingham would have a measurably better impact on passenger numbers and reliability. This is because Westminster has NEVER cared about infrastructure beyond Cheltenham and only goes to Birmingham out of convenience as the next largest population centre.

In and around London, by far, is also the MOST expensive place to build anything, blowing most of the initial budget within the boundary of the M25.

By applying Fix 1 and Fix 2 you can start implementation by using Fix 3: Start at multiple locations.

Starting the station and track construction from the other population centres of Manchester, Leeds, and Birmingham with these smaller projects means that you can then source funding from combined local authorities, implement the projects faster because of the lower density and cost to build than London, AND insulates the overall vision from being scrapped when the political climate changes.