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I am still confused that he is not a disembodied voice.

Bro manifested in a physical form

German here. We do need high speed trains so our trains can be late faster.

Every Uk government contract: "please build it on time and under budget, otherwise we will be forced to give you more time and more money"

I'm amazed that a channel dedicated to ripping on crap trains took this long to get to my home country

Adam has joined the army of creators showing their faces in order to combat AI content. Thank you, much appreciated.

From an engineering perspective, the reason 300 km/h is often preferred is that going from 250 to 300 is not much of a leap, the real leap is going over 200. Past that speed you need dedicated passing tracks at stations for safety, electronic control, absolutely no level crossings, and at least some care for not taking too many curves even if you keep it at 250. So if you're going through the trouble of doing 250, there's actually a good argument for 'overbuilding' to 300. And do keep in mind that this is the top rated speed, not regular running speed, so if you're going to allow over 200 for delay recovery (like the Swiss in the Gotthard tunnel), you need to build for 250 anyway. Also, Austria actually is getting high-speed rail for connecting to the Brenner base tunnel.

The disastrous choice in the UK was pushing for 400. Apart from that, great video as always!

That Putin cut was perfect.

7:00 you know as a french person this depiction of france is so accurate that it legitimately hurts

I work on the freight side of UK rail, and the disappointment with HS2 is palpable.  One of the things that capacity bump was meant to do was move passenger trains off the lines used by freight, so we could put more freight traffic through.  This is very smart, it helps the country meet green targets, helps local industry, secures jobs, etc etc.
Rishi screwed all that.

We're missing the point a bit by treating HS2 as a failed project. It hasn't failed, it's successfully funneled billions of taxpayer pounds to private contractors and consultants. It has done exactly what the corrupt politicians and capital class wanted it to.

The entire financial structure was almost designed for overspend:
- The government incentivized itself to publish the lowest cost projections
- Government promised to cover most / all cost overrun
- Thus companies were incentivized to pitch low-ball bids and had no incentive towards cost saving or just basic efficiency

At 3.45 that german train announcement is so real XD

Subtitles got "carpet bombed the country" as "corporate bombed the country". How poetic!

Logistics: "Slow is steady. Steady is fast."

Politicians: "My soon-to-be-cancelled high-speed train is 5kph faster in a sprint than yours, so I win!"

This is only the second time I've seen Adam in human form. Still love the editing. Glad you put your face on it (again) to avoid the "AI" accusations.

Didn't mention the reasons for the cost overruns being horrific contractor costs that absolutely drained the country so they couldn't commit to their plan, and now the trains that they bought they may as well use rather than leaving them to rot. Fun HS2 fact: when they actually started building the thing? On time and on budget within a tolerable margin. The engineering was absolutely fine. All the other stuff with contractors, surveyors, land purchase, planning, environmental contracting? Insanely expensive.

Despite the cost overruns; stopping it at Birmingham was the dumbest move of this entire project. They're now going to have a halfarsed rail line while also losing all of the expertise and construction capacity built up during the HS2 project. In 20 years time, when they have another go the next one it's going to cost an even more obscene amount of money.

The original concept of HS2 was actually very good. You didn't mention this, but the high design speed is actually part of what enables the high capacity. Faster trains means you can get more people through the same corridor of track per hour. I think you could argue the case that going for 300kph might've been more achievable than 400 and saved money, but I believe that would result in it not really encouraging many passengers off the East Coast Main Line because HS2 has to take a longer route. The main problem is the government mis-sold the project as being about speed and meddled with the spec too much, after it got started. If they'd just built it as planned, we'd be in a much better place than we are now. The whole Euston possible cancellation debacle is another massive farce that should've never happened. I have some hope that Andy Burnham's government can somehow rescue the project and at least get some new line built as far as Manchester to alleviate the most pressing capacity problem. I don't have a lot of hope for the eastern leg happening, but you never know.