I was interested in HS2 after seeing stuff about the Elizabeth Line, so I watched some YouTube videos about it. In my eyes it seems like a great project despite the high cost (easy for me to say since I'm not British), but holy smokes, the amount of people in the comments poo-pooing it with comments like below is absurd.

"It breaks my heart to see such needless desecration of our beautiful countryside for this catastrophe!" -- the video in question was drone footage over wholly unnatural farm fields. That will return to being farm fields once construction finishes, with a 20m strip of train tracks running through it. Of course, they didn't mention the existing motorway that was also in the shot.

"An obscene use of fossil fuels, environment, and money for something we don't really need." -- About a train that will use zero fossil fuels and will lessen demand for cars. Really.

Also, a bunch of people saying it's useless because it won't have a station in their town. It's a high-speed line, of course not! The whole point is to make local services faster and more frequent by removing express services from the existing over-crowded lines.