Amps the whole point of the reintroduction of the TEE and sleeper cars is that they’re not waking any cunt up in the middle of the nigh to traipse between stations.
You’re conflating two different things.
There is one, and only one way for a train to leave the UK internationally, and it’s the channel tunnel. There is one, and only one mainline that serves the channel tunnel - HS1. There is one and only one mainline station in London that services HS1, and has the required international border facilities to allow passengers to leave the UK - St Pancras.
For trains from Birmingham (or Liverpool, or Manchester, or Cardiff, or Bristol, or…) to access HS1, you’d either need to build at incredible cost new train lines that cross London, or new train lines that deviate around London. Given the spiralling costs of HS2, it’s not unreasonable to expect that that cost would be in the many tens of billions of £. As a taxpayer, I know that I feel that money could be better spent elsewhere, even if it means having to transfer all of 500m from one mainline station to another to take my onward international train. I know you don’t fly anymore, but your position is akin to being pissy because the flight to Ibiza you want to take flies from Gatwick, but you live closer to Heathrow.
TEE 2.0 is a distinctly different proposition. It’s largely looking at reintroducing train services on existing infrastructure, and over routes that, like you say, won’t require middle of the night changes of train. You’ve missed out a couple of key points though. If you wanna use TEE to travel from say, Cologne to Lyon (both part of the TEE network), you’ll travel via Paris, and you’ll need to walk a fuck sight more than 500m to get from Gare Du Nord to Gare Du Lyon for your connection. There’s also a huge amount of construction needed for the second phase of TEE 2.0, connecting Scandinavia with the mainline European network, and to upgrade the lines from Paris across Central Europe to Budapest.
The only country I can see that looks like it’s got high-speed rail just about right is China, where long distance rail services have long been integrated into urban planning for the mega-cities across the country. Also helps when you have an authoritarian government that gives zero fucks about displacing inhabitants to make way for new high speed lines, and station infrastructure. Are they the only non 3rd world khazi?
