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by dcel 38 days ago
High speed rail does not need to be straight! You can get away with 6km radii at 360km/h on dedicated passenger lines. The high power output of the EMUs they’ve selected and all new OHLE power supplies mean that trains can accelerate and decelerate much more aggressively than on legacy mixed use lines like the WCML, allowing smaller radii in practice with short slower sections. It’s a myth that HS2 is expensive because it had to be straight.

The vast majority of the tunnelling for HS2 has been either to get in and out of dense urban areas without too much demolition, or to reduce the political cost of driving a building site through Tory heartlands (Chilterns AONB).