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First sections of the M25 opened in 1975 so it was more than it was built in stages rather than slowly, obviously it was also supposed to be two separate roads. The UK motorway network is mostly an example of the UK building things fast, the first sections were contracted in May 1958 and opened...

There are a mountain of comparison documents. This one is from 2016 and specifically compares phase 2 so includes expected savings vs phase 1 and also excludes all the actual cost increases beyond inflation which have occurred on actual HS2...

France, Italy, Spain, Germany all have the same EU legacy laws that the UK has and all have protected species. Yet in those countries high speed rail projects have been done for a fraction of the cost per mile, plenty of those have been through tough terrain and plenty have been through densely...

Mods note - split from this thread https://www.railforums.co.uk/threads/restarting-hs2a.270436/ Latter sentence is to a degree why the former is true. The fact that we expect every line to be an economic net positive means that we are stuck doing similar things to what we have already done...

Latter sentence is to a degree why the former is true. The fact that we expect every line to be an economic net positive means that we are stuck doing similar things to what we have already done and thus have the economic data. Most of that data is also for rail that isn't anywhere near self...

Looking at the cost comparators from other countries plenty of people build high speed rail through much more difficult terrain than the south of England and do it for much less money. HS2 doesn't have a particularly high percentage of its length in tunnels. We are paying Bentley money for a...

I think any scheme to make a national body more capable is pretty far from being a monopsony for any skill that can be used in the rail construction industry. It has been a pretty continuous issue that the organisations building almost any major public project in the UK are generally under...

Asking a slightly different group of people selected by the same systems and culture that gave us HS2 is unlikely to result in the cost savings we need to make rail construction costs politically palatable. The line speed of the track is about reason 43 as to why HS2 was so expensive, the...

Time to get the Cheems Mindset out! (Cheems is the Doge on the left) Cheems mindset is that difficulties in implementing a policy are laws of nature rather than something to be tackled. The antidote to this is to look at things from a first principles perspective of whether something is...

The runaway might be quick but it doesn't demolish your house, it would start a fire which should be contained in the room that batteries are stored long enough for a smoke alarm to go off and the people inside to evacuate. The key bit is making sure its not near the evacuation route. Most of...

The two hours thing is ridiculous advice, it's based on the time to get to some obscure gates at an handful of old complicated airports. Nothing like that much time is really needed at most airports or terminals.

Yes, cost cutting and a hard nosed business culture have no place in aerospace. That's why Ryanair, South West and EasyJet don't exist and why flying is so much more expensive than taking the train. A culture that focuses on the method of decision making and having clear lines of responsibility...

That's a load of FUD when environmentalists lost the emissions arguments due to EVs, it's not really applicable to the countryside and the best way to solve it is to keep your roads nice and smooth. You can design a battery electric train to do any journey on the UK rail network it's just a...

I was thinking about this, if you were going to start from scratch with modern technology you would probably go for a higher voltage locally switched 3rd rail. So you only energise the section that is actually under a moving train, thus you'd be able to run it at a much higher voltage than 750DC...

Also the key figure is continuous power, rating which is typically an hour in duration. You can typically run a motor and inverter much harder for one or five minute ratings. The degree to which you can do this has gone down over time as more modern motors have less thermal mass for any given...

To be clear my original framing was around MTR, the various Japanese rail companies, Metropolitan Railway company and many of the companies that built the US railway and street car systems. They all built railways and funded them using land ownership around stations. I was meaning this rather...

I suspect a Spaniard or Parisian would disagree with you there: Grand Paris Express: 4 new lines, 2 extended 68 stations 200km length 135km underground 35 billion Euros Paris is even more densely populated than London and just as rich, we just over spec things, don't do rolling programmes and...

Every time you pay for a train ticket on average the taxpayer stands behind you and pays a similar amount, I'm pretty sue the public would support rail expanding and doing so by taking a share of the economic prosperity it helped create rather than asking for their tax money. Reasonable point...

See previous points about them also operating a fleet of more than 100 large freighter aircraft and a satellite constellation, they also handle the data of billions of people and handle the regulations of hundreds of countries across dozens of industries. The point is that what they are very...

Were rail to adopt Amazon like management practices it would be fallacious to assume that they would try to run it like Amazon run a distribution warehouse. As I put in my little table Amazon employs 1.55 million people it's entirely impossible to generalise as to how Amazon treats its...