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  This seems quite a good deal compared to what might have been. HS1 was expected to be sold outright for about a quarter of what it cost to build. Instead, it has been leased for thirty years for more than that to Canadian pension funds, a consortium of Borealis Infrastructure and Ontario Teachers' Pension Plan, with ownership retained by the British government. The Ontario Teachers' Pension Plan owns the national lottery Camelot as well as Bristol and Birmingham airports - they must have very rich teachers in Canada.
  
  Makes a nice change from just flogging off all our national infrastructure for peanuts as we have been doing for the last thirty years. Suppose it is wishful thinking that something similar might be negotiated for the poor old Port of Dover.
  
  HS1 (CTRL as was) has been underused from the outset. Initially there were just one or two Eurostars an hour in each direction. This was not a very good return on a £5bn+ dedicated high speed railway so the government spent nearly a billion pounds buying Japanese trains to run domestic high speed services on the line, equipped for dual voltage so that they could come off onto the classic lines, and slated to provide a St.Pancras-Stratford shuttle for the Olympics.
  
  EU liberalisation is expected to see DB and possibly SNCF trains providing services to alternative European destinations in the future so HS1 may finally realise its full potential.

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