It's either that or starlink, some railroads in Germany go through areas without any mobile network signal. Think about how crazy that is in 2026 when everything expects everyone to be online 24/7/365.
>> It’s believed the perpetrators of the attack were supporters of the Russian war effort, as the stop signals were also joined by broadcasts of the Russian national anthem and a speech from Russian President Vladimir Putin. The attacks have some significance to the invasion of Ukraine, as Poland has been a hub for crucial weapons deliveries supporting the defence of Ukraine.
Yes, yes, it's a code of honour not to use the someone' else national anthem, sure. Especially if you need to bolster the population support for some ongoing cause.
Was waiting for someone to bring this up. X is already full of similar nonsense. As if DB didn't have a track record of utterly broken infrastructure. For decades.
I guess by this logic we could also claim that "there Germans caused the power outage in Berlin last winter" because the perpetrators were likely German political activists.
My 100 bucks are on an expired certificate in the trust chain. the same kind of issue that took down almost all Verifone payment terminals in Germany in 2022.
That's what happens when you ignore critical infrastructure for three decades.
Of course, if the government were to correct the mistakes of the past, it would get worse for another decade. The necessary repairs would cause a lot more delays, and voters would then say "Were giving them so much extra money, and it gets worse? Unacceptable!". So I fear we'll continue to have these problems forever.
> Look at how much Switzerland spends per capita vs Germany. €477 vs €115
Your chart shows close to €200 spent by Deutschland per capita in 2024, before the abovementioned spending splurge (about €30/person/year). (The numbers 477 and 115 never appear in your source.)
€230 in Berlin purchases about as much as €371 of CHF in Zürich [1]. So no, I’m not seeing evidence Germany needs to further 3x capital expenditure to unfuck its system, and that’s before observing it spends more than Italy per capita, and Italy’s intercity rail is fantastic.
The number €115 is in the second chart as the per capita German expenditure on rail infrastructure in 2023. I don't see €477, but it's pretty close to the €480 figure for Switzerland in 2024. My guess is they saw an old version of the page when the first chart had numbers for 2023 and have kept using it without noticing the update.
Here's an article (in German) from last year where Richard Lutz, boss at the time of Deutsche Bahn, says they needed at least twice as much as what they were getting:
And here's an article (also in German) from this year about how the money that's been promised is not being delivered, leading to the cancelation of 90 projects.
Though I think they are not spending it sustainably. There is one train line and one lightrail line between my city and the next big city. They want to do things to the train line, blocking it for half a friggin year, and they make that announcement as if they do not give a damn about anyone, who relies on that line. Everyone will have to squeeze into the lightrail trains, which take longer. Often whole carriages are mephitic and unusable, when certain people have made them their temporary homes.
If things were done with an eye to the future, we would see things like extra lines, so that when things need to be renewed/maintained train service is not completely and utterly fucked for half a year for thousands of people, who want or need to take the train for daily commute. It is in my eyes utterly ridiculous, that we rely on a single track and are fucked, when literally anything at all needs to be done. Instant 100% train service disruption. This is Deutsche Bahn reliability.
Of course that would cost more ... It's cost accumulated by decades of neglect, and now they don't want to spend that money on the citizen, but rather pay biiiig juicy bonuses for management levels at Deutsche Bahn. Predatory capitalism at its best.
And that's not all. Their software and app sucks ass too.
NYC is spending around $68 billion to modernize their subway. Not sure what that’s says about Deutsche Bahn vs NYC/MTA but I’m sure both are not upgrading that much.
Not sure what I was expecting quality wise in Germany when I rode the DB rail between states and the Munich subway but it wasn’t much different than the US, except it much more expansive. Nothing fancy and it was late but I’d rather not pay for fancy here or there. Just make it work.
It's interesting how software systems and these large systems always have the same problem. Software failures are described by the engineers as being caused by "not enough maintenance and now the code needs to be refactored" and these real world systems are always caused by "not enough funding for preventative maintenance". It's a curious case that these issues are rarely caused by actions in the present but primarily by actions (and often other actors) in the past.
Presumably, we too shall be the villains to the people of 2050 as they shall, in turn, be the morons who built this stupid fucking system in this dumbass way instead of just designing it correctly and keeping it up to date over the years to the people of 2080. One thing I must consider doing is calling any fellow coworker an idiot pre-emptively since that way it's like I'm living 25 years in the future.
It's russian hybrid warfare against Germany. Since invasion of Ukraine there have been numerous cable cuttings on train tracks, several train derailments, some fires.
It has become so bad that police helicopters are regularly patrolling train routes at night to spot sabotage as early as possible. People complain about the flight noise at night which was not there before.
So as a person working in cyber security, I'd put this into the sabotage bucket.
For context, in case people are less familiar with German politics:
DB is in a misbegotten state of privatization, started in the 90ies. The government spun it out into a private company but still owns 100% of it. They were trying to pump it up so they could sell it for good money. They did that by skimping on everything including maintenance, to try and make the numbers look good.
Except they never got to whatever magic numbers they wanted before the maintenance debt came rearing its ugly head and now everything is royally screwed. And because it's a private company, there's a whole bunch of barriers limiting how much they can even subsidize the thing at this point.
Not sure if this is better or worse than the UK's Network Rail story, but at the end of the day the only thing that will solve this is if they re-nationalize the tracks & infrastructure. What kind of an idiot thought including that in the privatization is a good idea is beyond me. It's not like you can build a 2nd railway network in order to get free market & competition. (For comparison, imagine privatizing the entire road network, village street to Autobahn.)
> Not sure if this is better or worse than the UK's Network Rail story
“About 72 per cent of Deutsche Bahn’s intercity trains arrived within 10 minutes of their scheduled arrival time in the year to January 2025, compared with 78 per cent of British long-distance trains, according to the FT analysis.
Any interaction with the German rail network is also one of the biggest factors affecting the punctuality of long-distance rail travel in Central Europe” [1].
The UK's railway network was only privately owned from 1994 to 2002 though, everything after that is already under the umbrella of re-nationalisation, which didn't go super well either (my knowledge about that is rather vague). Not sure how useful 2025 numbers are in this context.
[ed.: to be clear - AFAIK they are in the same state currently, private company but 100% government owned. But there's a huge distinction in that the UK has made the decision to move back in the direction of nationalisation. In Germany, some people still pretend this is somehow fine and just needs to get cleaned up before the privatization can continue.]
The secret, as told in some other threads (elsewhere), is that "If the service is canceled, it can't have been late!" So trains that are over ~30 minutes late can be canceled.
The New Zealand government sold their rail system, then Toll didn't make a success of it, so the government bought it back at a massive loss.
Now rail is just a nightmare moneypit. But older voters love rail "it's efficient" so the government panders to them and wastes more expenditure on it.
Edit: Currently for every $1.50 tax income from road user taxes and petroleum taxes: $1 is spent on roads, and 50 cents is spent on "rail". Crap. Rail is paid for by cars but is mostly waste.
I don’t know much about New Zealand but I do know that a functioning rail network is amazing(I live in Switzerland and frequently travel by public transport).
My native Sweden had an amazing rail network as well, we even made our own locomotives, but unfortunately it has also been neglected, though not as bad as in Germany.
New Zealand is largely coastal so ships mostly beat rail. The 3 largest cities have their own ports. Cook Straight separates the South Island from the North Island, which complicates rail down South (apart from the Kaikoura Earthquake totally stuffing it). We don't do many bulk goods (unlike Australia which loves mining).
NZ overall has much less dense population - e.g. Auckland has insanely more urban sprawl than Zurich.
Sweeping statements about rail are a problem here (especially if incorrectly comparing against other populous or landlocked countries), and the biased love of rail makes for wasteful expenditure.
I don't know how many travelers use train instead of a car in New Zealand, but if it means 20% less traffic on the road, those taxes are probably worthy. That's what I say to all drivers which get nervous for sitting behind me when I bike to work. Think, that if I can't bike, there will be another car on the street.
You're mixing urban and national rail. The national rail system is freight focused (and some token tourist services).
Our politicians are involved with a very large money pit for a ferry between the islands: railcars being a VERY expensive requirement (I think because terminals for rail require much more engineering). It's a mess.
Railways are a difficult infrastructure, only one notch less difficult than airplanes. Even in terms of population, New Zealand would need at least 10 million population for dense railway network to make sense. Then car speed limit in NZ of mere 100kmh is very low, trains could easily move people faster than a car.
> Not sure if this is better or worse than the UK's Network Rail story, but at the end of the day the only thing that will solve this is if they re-nationalize the tracks & infrastructure. What kind of an idiot thought including that in the privatization is a good idea is beyond me. It's not like you can build a 2nd railway network in order to get free market & competition. (For comparison, imagine privatizing the entire road network, village street to Autobahn.)
If you privatize the infrastructure and trains together you can at least compare one region against another, even if they're not directly competing. Trying to operate the trains separately from the tracks was a disaster in the UK and lead pretty directly to two mass casualty incidents.
Governments can be just as bad at infrastructure investments.
That being said, I get the sense it's a German cultural problem. I used to travel to Germany quite frequently and was always surprised at the poor quality of much of the infrastructure, including private. The cell phone networks and internet speeds were all awful. As recently as 6 years ago my phone dropped to edge as soon as I left the city and within the major cities I had terrible performance. I'm not kidding when I say that I often had near dialup speeds, despite having full LTE bars. Maybe this has improved since.
As for rail, for Europe, the rail lines should probably be run as a cooperative with the rail companies paying dues.
It's not a purely cultural problem but mostly a political problem.
Germany sold out (a lot of it under the table and really fast without proper oversight) all of the good working stuff in the 90s to investors and the state kept all the bad stuff so there's no money or will to invest. All of your examples were state owned and operating nicely in the 80s. And then the CDU basically froze all progress for years under the umbrella of saving costs (instead of taxing the rich and companies and opening a lot of loopholes to transfer assets out of the country)
So all of the infrastructure in all aspects is on its last legs and somehow now you can't build stuff anymore anywhere apparently because everything takes forever in the western world especially in Germany where maddening Bureaucracy is apparently a good thing.
Well, the EU insists that track & train operations are separate. (ironically the UK _is_ combining passenger operations and track somewhat back together, which is only possible because of brexit).
The bigger issue tbh is the enormous cost inflation in civil engineering in general. This seems to be a problem everywhere. There's no doubt some of this is caused by material cost increases, labour shortages etc, but I'd say the huge amounts of regulation added over the years is really a core driver of this.
No. They cut on maintenance to make line go up. And then they deconstructed existing switches, signal boxes, train lines, and train stations to cut costs even more. This is not an EU problem or a regulations problem or labour cost problem. These are the fruits of privatisation and capitalism.
What is the incentive for politicians to sell a publicly owned company for a lot of money? How would they personally benefit from a high price? I can only think of incentives to sell it for as little as possible to a most favored investor/buddy.
I was once on a job interview there, in the Train/Station Wifi branch, mostly web programming related though IIRC. It wasn't so much of a quiz format but the interviewers wanted to know what I worked on before, why I wanted to change etc. What really stuck with me was how the department CTO insisted how superior and privacy conforming their logging system is. Not saving anything, not even for a micro second. I didn't dare to ask how they debugged anything. But in the end I was rejected and the reason was: more questions than answers.
Could also be a russian firembomber gig worker getting brushed under mnt carpet of societal stability. Anything to keep this powderkeg of parallel societies going ..
Given the current heat wave, it might be a case of "trains not running because it's too hot"?
As opposed to, you know, "trains not running because it's too cold", e.g. because of icing on the overhead lines.
Well, it was a *planned* update of a central system component in their radio. That's why the restauration took only 8 hours. Their 90 min excuse is bonkers. Unplanned it would have taken much longer. Can confirm that their update planning process is abyssal. Half a year for the first simple reply. Comparable only to HP
Signalling still works, so you can let the trains continue to a safe place like a station and then not let them leave until the radio issue is resolved
Stop signals. For legacy train control systems, these still work visually and via wires. ETCS (starting with Level 2) does use GSM-R, but everything is fail-safe: No active communication, no movement authority, so the "virtual signal" display in the cab will pretty quickly also show "stop".
"IT Outage: No train service nationwide. Due to a nationwide outage of the GSMR digital rail radio system, all trains are being held at stations. We are working around the clock to resolve the issue.
Our technicians are working around the clock to resolve the outage.
Please continue to check your travel connection immediately before departure using the travel information service at bahn.de, the DB Navigator app, or by calling the travel information hotline at 030/2970."
Current suspicion on the German rails reddit is a software update gone wrong.
My personal suspicion, GSM-R is 90s GSM, they'll likely have a fried HLR & VLR because in any GSM network these are fundamental, without them you can't even get roaming from public phone networks working as there is no way for the public network to authenticate GSM-R subscribers.
I’m sitting in an ICE in Munich that was supposed to leave a few minutes before I saw this story on HN. First the conductor announced a 30 minute delay because the radio wasn’t working, and then they bumped it to 2 hours. They didn’t say it was a systemwide problem.
Luckily: Update from announcer is that trains can start again at 12:25 AM and they reduced our delay by 30 minutes. But there’s still a huge line of riders at the DB service desk.
In Erfurt since 2,5 hours. Out of office train driver keeps us updated from chats with fellow drivers (their sources say it is due to software update), radio is fixed now and trains processed one after another (starting with super fast ones - Munich > Berlin, e.g. - so the tracks get emptied quickly). Other interesting observations: when our train stopped, all hotels were already fully booked, as were coach tickets (Flixbus) that would run in the early morning. Crazy how fast people react to shocks.
Yeah, I experienced that a few times in airports with massive disturbance. You could see all the hotels getting fully booked almost live, then when you eventually arrive somewhere with a booking you still have to wait an hour due to how long the queue at the hotel reception is. Always a crazy experience
I am a daily user of S-Bahn. I know 2 alternative routes from every single station from home to work. I even started to memorize their departure times. DB prepares you for the worst.
I was at a conference in Frankfurt, traveling back to Amsterdam with my cofounder and got stuck in Oberhausen. We have an early flight tomorrow and there's no trains in NL due to a strike tomorrow morning, so we decided to take an uber home.
At first the delay was 30 minutes. Then 2 hours. After 1h30 with zero updates we decided to bail. Just checked and nothing is moving yet, so we made the right call.
We departed around 30-45 min late from Basel sbb (in Switzerland) in a night train that goes through Germany.
They told us about the communication issues but what surprised me is that they told us that the Deutsch bahn replaced the locomotive with one of their (that was near the border I guess) so we could depart.
The other article is only one sentence long. I guess the OP posted it and later found this that is a better source. (Un)luckily both reached the front page. Usually dang/tomhow will make a cleanup soon to avoid duplication and keep the discussion in a single thread.
There was also a very peculiar train crash in the UK just a few days ago. A train hit a stationary train. That shouldn't really happen in this day and age. Sabotage was the first thing that came to my mind.
Incorrect. They wouldn't fit in the tiny UK loading gauge (profile). UK trains are indeed variants of continental models, but made to custom size, and many (most?) of them in the UK.
Everything about UK rail is custom (apart from the gauge). Apparently it's one of the (many) reasons HS2 is such a mess.
They were trying to run trains faster than typical continental high speed lines, which meant custom design work that needs loads of additional testing and certification. Rather than just use the Spanish or French high speed designs.
Max line speed of HS2 is 360km/h, with provision for 400 in some sections in future. This is entirely in line with many other modern HS lines. China’s been running regular 360km/h services for years.
This is a project with a 200+ year shelf life. Designing to 300 or less would have been short sighted, and many of the changes to accommodate such high speeds actually reduce costs in the long term (slab track, headroom to catch up delayed services, ability for one trainset to operate more services per day etc).
The cost overruns of HS2 are primarily from plain old poor project management, complex planning law and constant political meddling, not engineering decisions.
China has run at 360kmh before, but last I checked they mostly run slower.
Air resistance is a killer as you go faster. So for trains 300 is usually about the best compromise between energy use and speed. If you want to go faster a jet at altitude is going to be much faster at a better fuel efficiency. High speeds make sense for long distances.
Was it similar to what we’re seeing now (nationwide, radio related)?
tl;dr: Trains can be stopped by a transmitting a simple, documented tone sequence over analog radio.
Honestly, DB are perfectly capable of clusterf*cking their GSM-R without help from Russia.
>> It’s believed the perpetrators of the attack were supporters of the Russian war effort, as the stop signals were also joined by broadcasts of the Russian national anthem and a speech from Russian President Vladimir Putin. The attacks have some significance to the invasion of Ukraine, as Poland has been a hub for crucial weapons deliveries supporting the defence of Ukraine.
Yes, yes, it's a code of honour not to use the someone' else national anthem, sure. Especially if you need to bolster the population support for some ongoing cause.
I guess by this logic we could also claim that "there Germans caused the power outage in Berlin last winter" because the perpetrators were likely German political activists.
Of course, if the government were to correct the mistakes of the past, it would get worse for another decade. The necessary repairs would cause a lot more delays, and voters would then say "Were giving them so much extra money, and it gets worse? Unacceptable!". So I fear we'll continue to have these problems forever.
To be fair, Deutsche Bahn is currently spending “€107bn between 2025 and 2029” on infrastructure upgrades [1].
[1] https://www.ft.com/content/db75e347-b13b-4753-8130-6301bb55c...
According to whom?
source: https://www.allianz-pro-schiene.de/themen/infrastruktur/inve...
Your chart shows close to €200 spent by Deutschland per capita in 2024, before the abovementioned spending splurge (about €30/person/year). (The numbers 477 and 115 never appear in your source.)
€230 in Berlin purchases about as much as €371 of CHF in Zürich [1]. So no, I’m not seeing evidence Germany needs to further 3x capital expenditure to unfuck its system, and that’s before observing it spends more than Italy per capita, and Italy’s intercity rail is fantastic.
[1] https://www.paritydeals.com/ppp-calculator/switzerland-vs-ge...
https://www.tagesspiegel.de/wirtschaft/mobilitaet/trotz-sond...
And here's an article (also in German) from this year about how the money that's been promised is not being delivered, leading to the cancelation of 90 projects.
https://www.tagesspiegel.de/politik/es-fehlt-das-geld-mehr-a...
I also remember an article about how part of the train budget was being redistributed to fix highways, but I can't find it right now.
So I agree with the parent comment: the current investment is not enough and what little they have is constantly being diverted.
If things were done with an eye to the future, we would see things like extra lines, so that when things need to be renewed/maintained train service is not completely and utterly fucked for half a year for thousands of people, who want or need to take the train for daily commute. It is in my eyes utterly ridiculous, that we rely on a single track and are fucked, when literally anything at all needs to be done. Instant 100% train service disruption. This is Deutsche Bahn reliability.
Of course that would cost more ... It's cost accumulated by decades of neglect, and now they don't want to spend that money on the citizen, but rather pay biiiig juicy bonuses for management levels at Deutsche Bahn. Predatory capitalism at its best.
And that's not all. Their software and app sucks ass too.
Not sure what I was expecting quality wise in Germany when I rode the DB rail between states and the Munich subway but it wasn’t much different than the US, except it much more expansive. Nothing fancy and it was late but I’d rather not pay for fancy here or there. Just make it work.
Presumably, we too shall be the villains to the people of 2050 as they shall, in turn, be the morons who built this stupid fucking system in this dumbass way instead of just designing it correctly and keeping it up to date over the years to the people of 2080. One thing I must consider doing is calling any fellow coworker an idiot pre-emptively since that way it's like I'm living 25 years in the future.
It has become so bad that police helicopters are regularly patrolling train routes at night to spot sabotage as early as possible. People complain about the flight noise at night which was not there before.
So as a person working in cyber security, I'd put this into the sabotage bucket.
DB is in a misbegotten state of privatization, started in the 90ies. The government spun it out into a private company but still owns 100% of it. They were trying to pump it up so they could sell it for good money. They did that by skimping on everything including maintenance, to try and make the numbers look good.
Except they never got to whatever magic numbers they wanted before the maintenance debt came rearing its ugly head and now everything is royally screwed. And because it's a private company, there's a whole bunch of barriers limiting how much they can even subsidize the thing at this point.
Not sure if this is better or worse than the UK's Network Rail story, but at the end of the day the only thing that will solve this is if they re-nationalize the tracks & infrastructure. What kind of an idiot thought including that in the privatization is a good idea is beyond me. It's not like you can build a 2nd railway network in order to get free market & competition. (For comparison, imagine privatizing the entire road network, village street to Autobahn.)
“About 72 per cent of Deutsche Bahn’s intercity trains arrived within 10 minutes of their scheduled arrival time in the year to January 2025, compared with 78 per cent of British long-distance trains, according to the FT analysis.
Any interaction with the German rail network is also one of the biggest factors affecting the punctuality of long-distance rail travel in Central Europe” [1].
[1] https://www.ft.com/content/d3b6e6b5-eddb-4230-b866-932d284ce...
[ed.: to be clear - AFAIK they are in the same state currently, private company but 100% government owned. But there's a huge distinction in that the UK has made the decision to move back in the direction of nationalisation. In Germany, some people still pretend this is somehow fine and just needs to get cleaned up before the privatization can continue.]
Now rail is just a nightmare moneypit. But older voters love rail "it's efficient" so the government panders to them and wastes more expenditure on it.
Edit: Currently for every $1.50 tax income from road user taxes and petroleum taxes: $1 is spent on roads, and 50 cents is spent on "rail". Crap. Rail is paid for by cars but is mostly waste.
My native Sweden had an amazing rail network as well, we even made our own locomotives, but unfortunately it has also been neglected, though not as bad as in Germany.
Don’t diss rail, it can be great.
New Zealand is largely coastal so ships mostly beat rail. The 3 largest cities have their own ports. Cook Straight separates the South Island from the North Island, which complicates rail down South (apart from the Kaikoura Earthquake totally stuffing it). We don't do many bulk goods (unlike Australia which loves mining).
NZ overall has much less dense population - e.g. Auckland has insanely more urban sprawl than Zurich.
Sweeping statements about rail are a problem here (especially if incorrectly comparing against other populous or landlocked countries), and the biased love of rail makes for wasteful expenditure.
Auckland: ca. 1000 people/km² in 30km radius
Zürich: ca. 800 people/km² in 30km radius
People severely underestimate how sprawly Zürich is.
Our politicians are involved with a very large money pit for a ferry between the islands: railcars being a VERY expensive requirement (I think because terminals for rail require much more engineering). It's a mess.
Passenger numbers start rising before privatisation, and that was attributed to an uptick in the economy (after a period of recession).
If you privatize the infrastructure and trains together you can at least compare one region against another, even if they're not directly competing. Trying to operate the trains separately from the tracks was a disaster in the UK and lead pretty directly to two mass casualty incidents.
That being said, I get the sense it's a German cultural problem. I used to travel to Germany quite frequently and was always surprised at the poor quality of much of the infrastructure, including private. The cell phone networks and internet speeds were all awful. As recently as 6 years ago my phone dropped to edge as soon as I left the city and within the major cities I had terrible performance. I'm not kidding when I say that I often had near dialup speeds, despite having full LTE bars. Maybe this has improved since.
As for rail, for Europe, the rail lines should probably be run as a cooperative with the rail companies paying dues.
Germany sold out (a lot of it under the table and really fast without proper oversight) all of the good working stuff in the 90s to investors and the state kept all the bad stuff so there's no money or will to invest. All of your examples were state owned and operating nicely in the 80s. And then the CDU basically froze all progress for years under the umbrella of saving costs (instead of taxing the rich and companies and opening a lot of loopholes to transfer assets out of the country)
So all of the infrastructure in all aspects is on its last legs and somehow now you can't build stuff anymore anywhere apparently because everything takes forever in the western world especially in Germany where maddening Bureaucracy is apparently a good thing.
The bigger issue tbh is the enormous cost inflation in civil engineering in general. This seems to be a problem everywhere. There's no doubt some of this is caused by material cost increases, labour shortages etc, but I'd say the huge amounts of regulation added over the years is really a core driver of this.
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linienförmige_Zugbeeinflussung
Our technicians are working around the clock to resolve the outage.
Please continue to check your travel connection immediately before departure using the travel information service at bahn.de, the DB Navigator app, or by calling the travel information hotline at 030/2970."
https://www.bahn.de/service/fahrplaene/aktuell
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/October_2022_German_railway_at...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GSM-R
My personal suspicion, GSM-R is 90s GSM, they'll likely have a fried HLR & VLR because in any GSM network these are fundamental, without them you can't even get roaming from public phone networks working as there is no way for the public network to authenticate GSM-R subscribers.
And merge with https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48651613
At first the delay was 30 minutes. Then 2 hours. After 1h30 with zero updates we decided to bail. Just checked and nothing is moving yet, so we made the right call.
They told us about the communication issues but what surprised me is that they told us that the Deutsch bahn replaced the locomotive with one of their (that was near the border I guess) so we could depart.
https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=sva_
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c4gy60gg6k5o
British person living in Berlin.
Trains in Germany and the UK for main-line running both use 1435mm gauge. UK trains are not a custom size.
They were trying to run trains faster than typical continental high speed lines, which meant custom design work that needs loads of additional testing and certification. Rather than just use the Spanish or French high speed designs.
This is a project with a 200+ year shelf life. Designing to 300 or less would have been short sighted, and many of the changes to accommodate such high speeds actually reduce costs in the long term (slab track, headroom to catch up delayed services, ability for one trainset to operate more services per day etc).
The cost overruns of HS2 are primarily from plain old poor project management, complex planning law and constant political meddling, not engineering decisions.
Air resistance is a killer as you go faster. So for trains 300 is usually about the best compromise between energy use and speed. If you want to go faster a jet at altitude is going to be much faster at a better fuel efficiency. High speeds make sense for long distances.