Taxpayer money tree, so why spare any expense?
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Glacial speed is another reason when the government & railways are involved, the West Heathrow loop was proposed in 2012 connecting Reading & Slough to Terminal 5 with a 3.4mile link which would be operational by 2020, this has slipped to 2024, if we are lucky!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_Rail_Approach_to_HeathrowDon't ask if & when the Heathrow Southern Railway link will be built where it was proposed in 2017 with a tentative operational date of 2025-27 for it's mighty 8 miles of new track.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heathrow_Southern_RailwayI fully support both of these privately financed lines that IMO should have been build years a go, where trying to get to Heathrow as our premier UK airport from the West/South West using public transport has always been a joke & at long last we will have decent connections.
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So with HS2 you have all this money wasting jobs for Civil Servants, who can put in on average 10 minutes in the morning between first & seconds tea breaks & then after a leisurely 1-2 hour lunch they can do another 10 minutes between tea breaks three & four, before leaving on the dot from all this exhausting hard work.
Another major escalation on costs is climate fraud where it need to be 'carbon neutral' & lined with thousands of noisy bird slaughterers so at the bottom of the next carbon cycle we drop below 120ppm & all C3 plants and almost all animal life dies, swell. Hard-left tree huggers are happy to destroy life on earth to get rid of their hated capitalist Western civilization & most animal life as collateral damage is acceptable. They have never forgiven us for defeating their Marxist ideology in 1991 with the fall of the Soviet Union & China seeing their only survival path for their Communism was by bolting capitalism on to the side of it. Climate fraud where I have been digging on the history of this was started in the 1990's but a group of UN Canadian environmentalists where the West is based on abundant, cheap, reliable, energy. A clever new front by the hard-left to prove they had lost a Marxist battle but by no means lost their subversive war.
The rich play holier-than-though by offsetting their carbon footprint while the many plebs pick up the real costs like HS2 cost escalation, expensive, rare, unreliable energy & the steady deindustrialization of the West where India & China are happy with their 550 coal fired power stations under construction to become the industrial powerhouses of the 21st century as we descend to 3rd world status industrially & culturally.
Spending on bad 'white elephant' projects that will never come near to paying for themselves, just weakens a country & it should IMO be scrapped.