It costs How much ??
At £34 billion, the cost of HS2 construction comfortably exceeds the annual UK transport budget, which was £23bn for 2011/12
HS2 and other projects
The estimated cost of each phase of HS2 is similar to that of Crossrail, and somewhat more than the cost ( at 2005 prices ) of acquiring the current Trident submarine fleet. It is significantly more than the 12.8 bn Euros required to build ITER, the experimental fusion reactor - "one of the most ambitious science endeavors of our time ", which is the next step towards developing CO2 free baseload energy generation, without the long term waste associated with current Nuclear ( Fission ) reactors. Investing in future technology would do more to revive British industry than purchasing an expensive foreign trainset.
Alternatively, the money could
- clear the road repair backlog, creating jobs & spreading benefits throughout the country
- buy 10 Queen Elizabeth class aircraft carriers, possibly with planes
- fund the Afghan war for another 8 years
- liberate Libya for the next 16 years
- reverse the university funding cuts for 30 years
- build 40 millennium domes, one for every 5 or 6 miles of track
while the capacity issues on the West Coast main line could be addressed by Rail Package 2 ( the previous, but now hidden, Dept for Transport solution ), which provides the extra capacity by running longer trains on the existing tracks, and shorter journey times by re-engineeering several pinch points. This was costed at around £2bn, and can be implemented incrementally, to provide improvements within a few years, rather than wait for the first HS2 trains ( to Birmingham ) in 2025.