In Britain, high-speed rail was hailed as a game-changer,The government is reevaluating costs

The British government said on Sunday that it may abandon a significant portion of a high-speed rail line that has been delayed and overbudget and was previously promoted as a means to bring employment and investment to northern England.

The route will stop in Birmingham, which is 100 miles (160 kilometers) from London, rather than farther north in Manchester, according to reports in the British media.

The disputed High Speed 2 project has not yet received a final approval, according to the Conservative administration.

However, Grant Shapps, a cabinet minister, said that it was “proper and responsible” to reevaluate a project whose prices had risen sharply as a result of rising inflation brought on by the COVID-19 outbreak and the conflict in Ukraine.

Shapps, a former transportation secretary who is now the UK’s defense minister, said, “We’ve seen very, very high global inflation in a way that no government could have predicted.”

He told the BBC that merely spending money and continuing as usual would be foolish.

The line’s anticipated cost, which was formerly hailed as Europe’s greatest infrastructure project, was 33 billion pounds in 2011, however other estimates have it at more than 100 billion pounds (USD 122 billion).

Following the HS1 route that connects London and the Channel Tunnel that connects England and France, HS2 is the second high-speed rail line in the UK.

The new railway, with peak speeds of around 250 mph (400 kph), was designed to shorten travel times and boost capacity between London, Birmingham in central England, and Manchester and Leeds in the north.

The project was promoted as a solution to improve the aging, congested, and unreliable railway network in the north, despite objections from environmentalists and MPs from areas along the route. It was praised by the government as a crucial component of its strategy to “level up” prosperity across the nation.

As London and the south became wealthier in an economy dominated by finance and services, the north of England, which had once been Britain’s economic engine, saw industries like coal, cotton, and shipbuilding vanish.

The government preserved its intention to build tracks on the 160 miles (260 km) between London and Manchester but scrapped the Birmingham to Leeds portion of HS2 in 2021.

Longtime supporter of the initiative and former Conservative Prime Minister Boris Johnson said further scaling it down “makes no sense at all.”

According to Johnson, it is not surprising that Chinese colleges use the ongoing cancellation of UK infrastructure as an illustration of what is wrong with democracy.

Northern English residents, according to Manchester Mayor Andy Burnham, “are always treated as second-class citizens when it comes to transportation.”

According to Burnham, a member of the opposition Labour Party, “if they leave a situation where the southern half of the country is connected by modern high-speed lines, and the north of England is left with Victorian infrastructure, that is a recipe for the north-south divide to become a north-south chasm over the rest of this century.”

The government has also postponed efforts to extend the line all the way to central London’s Euston station. Trains will commence and end at Old Oak Common station in the city’s western suburbs when it opens, perhaps between 2029 and 2033.

That would result in “a ridiculous situation where a high speed’ journey between Birmingham and central London could take as long as the existing route, if not longer,” according to London Mayor Sadiq Khan.

In a letter to Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, Khan warned that “the government’s approach to HS2 risks squandering the enormous economic opportunity that it presents and turning it into a colossal waste of public money.”