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What's the cost of building a brand new route versus further upgrading of the existing West Coast and East Coast main lines? If all the fast trains were diverted onto HS2, that would free up the existing routes for freight and suburban traffic and many of the junctions and stations that are currently bottlenecks on the existing routes would no longer be so much of an issue.
Also, building a separate new route would not cause disruption to existing traffic as piecemeal improvements to the Victorian infrastructure would. Witness the £10 billion or so the last West Coast Main Line cost - it would have been almost and cheap to have built HS2 and far less disruptive to rail travellers.
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