The most glaring example is the quadruple tracking of Karlsruhe-Basel with a high-speed line... The most recent financing plan of the ministry of transport (Update [2010-10-4 0:28:39 by epochepoque]: link added) even shows that for the next ten years K.-B. is set to receive €117 million to a maximum of a few hundred million in total!

That's simply criminal... and delaying the completion of the Karlsruhe-Basel four-tracking all in itself increases the costs (more interests, more money to be spent on repeated planning, more inflation, more adjacent infrastructure, more stringent building codes).

even flashy pet projects like Nuremberg-Erfurt are subject to the laws of mathematics. Costing more than €5 billion it probably won't be finished until 2040, either. The official date of 2017 is mathematically impossible.

Hm? How so? All of the tunnels are now bored (with the longest and most critical nearing holing-through), the superstructure of most of the major bridges are in advanced construction, and the partly still to be contracted track construction is not where delays tend to accumulate. Also, its pet project status must be qualified: the routing of the Munich-Berlin line via Erfurt (rather than the shorter existing route via Saalfeld or via Plauen, which would have been less geologically challenging and thus cheaper) was a rather expensive present for the Thuringian government. However, the line was then short of funds for a decade (and thus kept inflating costs further without anything happening) just like Karlsruhe-Basel -- while the parallel A71/A73 highway was finished...

_{*Lunatic*, n.
One whose delusions are out of fashion.}