Regarding Germany and its single main stations - Germany is a federal state with a much less centralised history than the UK. None of their cities compare to London in terms of size and concentration of rail need. Even at the main Munich station there are only 32 platforms - how many would London need in total? Destruction in WW2 and Berlin's divided history helped to keep land clear to create a major interchange at their new Hauptbahnhof. So, unless some random terrorist blows up a massive section of central London and clears some land, it's not going to happen here.
Fair points, but in the context of transport planning, I was pointing out that we
should be trying to learn from the Germans when it comes to the railways, whereas we have
less to learn from them when it comes to airports.
There are numerous cities around the world of a similar size (in terms of rail pax) to London which have one main station, or which only have a couple of main stations (New York, Chicago), or which have a central station and other main station which is directly linked to the central station (Tokyo) and so on.
What we are doing with HS2 is creating one new station, which could link many strands together, but which misses the opportunity to do so (Old Oak Common), and two new stations which are separate to the rest of the network.
Even St Pancras is the wrong way round for through running.
So the bottom lines is, even if "London Hbf" isn't going to happen, we still aren't learning.