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The battery wagon has a massive battery on it, there is no particular reason why it can't run around with the loco. In terms of costing train length, we are looking at losing 1 container to get electric freight costs with minimal infrastructure upgrade costs. Wireless train control is not new...

Tell me you're from Cambridgeshire without telling me you're from Cambridgeshire! One of the towns I grew up in had a peak elevation of 270m and a maximum delta of 180m, with a population of 29,000 and was in the past dominated by heavy industry, which was actually located at the top of the...

All feasible, though I suspect that you wouldn't fit double the size of battery you need as most routes will give you plenty of scope to charge for part of the route. Batteries have primarily become cheaper not higher energy density. You'd use an LFP type which would probably be ~150w/kg in...

We discussed the water on another thread, you could build reservoirs but ultimately desalination is the cheat code here. If you can match Israeli costs you wouldn't notice the difference on your bills. Suggest that if anyone wants to argue this they spend some time with Gemini asking how much...

Sign the pledge/petition if interested. As much as I regularly make the point that we need 4 million plus homes and even a city of 1 million people doesn't cover more than 1/10 of that amount and takes decades to fill up I still think we should do something like this. Mainly just to show that...

"Whatever can be done can be afforded" is a Keynes quote, it is fundamentally true, you just can't do everything all at once. In the longer term it is possible to get more efficient so that you can do more things with the same resources and given how crap we are at building this is a massive...

Anything that can be done can be afforded, particularly when that thing has a massive ROI which anything infrastructural around the Ox-Cam corridor will if you do it at rates that our equally rich and settled neighbours can do. Just to be clear you can supply 1 million peoples generous daily...

Rail should be forbidden from using the "minimum viable product" terminology, clearly someone read the "lean startup" about 10 years ago and liked the terminology but then completely misapplied it. You do an MVP to test your idea, then on the basis of that you will either scale up or pivot to...

We are a rich country that lives on an island, nowhere is more than 70 miles from the sea and most of the country is pretty rainy. If we are constrained by water what we really mean is that we are constrained by processes and living with those processes for so long that we lose our imagination...

Ah but who is advocating for the people who don't currently live or work in the Cambridge area but would like to? I have looked at the Greater Cambridge plan and I'd suggest that it is rather limited in its ambitions, greater Cambridge currently has a population of 300,000. The plan is to have...

I suspect that these are using the government measure of deprivation IMD from here: https://deprivation.communities.gov.uk/ Index of Multiple Deprivation (IMD) Index of Multiple Deprivation (IMD) combines information from the seven domains to produce an overall relative measure of...

Something of interest to this thread: Centre for British Progress had released a piece of work recommending properly going all out on the Oxford Cambridge axis by having a development corporation for the whole area which would have the powers to call in all the planning powers in the region as...

It is entirely a political issue, resource issues are a very short term problems. History is littered with examples of countries building much more infrastructure than 3 railway lines at the same time. There are 70 million of us, finding 100,000 people is not that difficult and it only really...

A lot of the course of one of those trams uses the former bed of the Great Northern Railway which has only partially been built over. In the rest of the city it's more difficult as the road network is radial with pretty poor interconnections and most of those radial roads lacking space to run a...

Aside from the numerous cities who do get busways to work there is also the potential to do it with self driving mini-buses in which case you have quite a potent transport solution. We also mess up deploying trams and railways in this country, a single poor demonstration does not mean that an...

The problem is that the scope of the long term visions are more in line with what should be done in a short term vision. Old men planting trees in who's shade they will never sit in only do it because they've seen tree grow over their lifetime and they watched their fathers plant trees for them...

Have you noticed a large surfeit of logic in any transport decision? For example Newcastle has the closest thing to the London Underground (Metro runs about twice as fast as the Manchester Metrolink) it is far from the largest conurbation in the UK or the most economically successful. There...

I think this shows the problem with UK planning: 1: We move so slowly that short term objectives have long term time horizons 2: When we do have a long term plan it is not funded and is likely to be overtaken by events In the short term freight isn't about to be washed away by autonomous in...

The grid lock stage will then give political cover to implement demand based road charging which will then cause people share journeys when they go through a choke point. Ride sharing is pretty easy to implement through a self driving Uber type system and the delays picking people up will be...

Every city in France with over 100,000 people has trams. The principal issue is that the cost of building trams is multiples higher than on the continent. Some of that is due to the fact that in the UK every utility is moved when it’s built at the cost of the tram builder. Whereas on the...