[Ignitionnet]

Originally Posted by Chrysalis

I did manage to find this which indicates its costing france 15billion GBP to lay 1250 miles of high speed track.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009...rail-in-france

So for our 32billion we getting approx 102 miles of track.

A fair point. It should be asked just why it's so expensive both to build railways here and then to run them.

Network Rail are abysmal both in terms of value for money and, obviously, results.

http://www.rail-reg.gov.uk/server/show/nav.2499

We have undertaken extensive econometric model development and sensitivity testing. Our results show that, in 2008, Network Rail was between 34 to 40% less cost-efficient than the top European infrastructure managers in the peer group. This result broadly confirms the econometric analysis we undertook in PR08 which showed that, compared to the top European infrastructure managers, Network Rail was around 40% less cost-efficient.

Nice juggling of words, essentially though network rail is 68 - 80% more expensive than the top European infrastructure managers in the peer group, 40% less cost efficient being an obfuscated way of saying that things cost 80% more than they could.