I would be interested to know the sort of costs Germany have on maintaining their rail network. it's been a few years so things may have changed but last time I was there I went all across the country on train. the service was superb and the price was incredible (cheaper than driving that is for sure unlike here)
rather than HS2 I would rather just have a properly functioning entire network. push comes to shove the journey to London is already better than to most other places in the uk
One of the issues is, I believe Germany's rail network is on the whole much newer than ours (largely/completely rebuilt after the war for west germany, massive modernisation after reunification for east). so it's probably much cheaper to maintain than ours which in many areas is basically trying to maintain higher speeds over routes that were laid down over 100 years ago and really need to be rebuilt from scratch.
Another one is that IIRC Germany has many more interconnects between their lines, and additional parallel routes, which means it's far easier to actually do work without shutting everything down, which means they can do works that might shut down a length of track for weeks without it basically throwing the whole network into chaos. We don't have that ability so it's normal for us to do work overnight of which 2 hours might be pulling up the temporary stuff they did to let the trains run during the day, 3 hours might be actual progress, then another 2 hours might be making it so the trains can run (at reduced speeds) during the day. The result being that work that could be done in a week of 24/7 work if the line could be shut down takes months with the trains running slow that whole time.
This is what the likes of HS2 were meant to help with to a degree, as has been said many, many times, forget the nonsense about "saving a few minutes" it's an additional line that is completely new, which means that it increases the capacity of the network roughly in parallel with an existing much slower line. Once finished you could potentially do massive improvements to the other line with far less overall disruption.
We need dozens of "HS2's", not leave this one half finished if we actually want a public transport network that is working properly - I use the train for some trips and IF I can get a seat it's usually much more relaxing and comfortable than sitting in a car*, but we're so short of capacity that it's "normal" for many trains to have large numbers of passengers standing the whole trip, and that's before you take into account any disruption due to say a broken down train, maintenance, or a death on the line.
Our rail network is exceptionally fragile with almost no redundancy in the routes compared to most of Europe, let alone Japan or China (who are basically building the equivalent of both a motorway and A road network of rail, whilst we're basically running a single lane A road with only a handful of B roads).
Ironically if kept a rail building project that was constantly running rather than one "big" project every 25 years it would probably be far cheaper per mile because you'd have a pool of experienced people who would go from one job to another. and you'd get similar economies of scale to what you get with the road network.
*Most cars are definitely not intended for someone my height as a passenger.
