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The issues are mostly: 1: All levels of government lack capacity to plan and build of transport infrastructure. I saw a film recently of a rail bridge being slid into position as part of the Derby ring road in 1970's a reasonably ground breaking approach especially as it was being done under...

Well quite, if you want to do something cheaply you need to be good at doing it and adopt the best techniques. To both acquire the best techniques and be proficient you need to both practice and experiment which means that you also need to risk failure (relative failure, you might actually be...

How is that going for the country? This is precisely how countries in Europe who build infrastructure for a fraction of the UKs do it. The local authorities with tax raising powers put “build a metro” into their manifesto and are then directly on the hook for its development. They don’t need...

We have Metro Mayors in West Midlands and Greater Manchester, we have a Mayor for the East Midlands and South and West Yorkshire and we have a Mayor for Warrington and Cheshire in advanced stages of consultation. We'd need the process for Staffordshire to get going and then we'd have Mayors...

This is because London has all of the tax raising powers and it profiting from decades/hundreds of years of enhanced infrastructure spending. Until devolution comes with proper tax raising powers our second tier cities will continue to under perform.

See above, I'm talking about changing the scope and methods rather than just doing it in the same manner as HS2 would have. Given HS2 is substantially more expensive than other lines even after you account for UK land prices and the specification of the line (tunnels, cuttings, bridges) there...

I mean: 1: The commercial arrangements where for example the contractors we asked to guarantee works for decades into the future which resulted in civils over specced by massive margins (the infamous deeper pilings on a road bridge than were used on the Shard and deeper pilings on OHLE towers...

See previous point about using the battery as a structural member, for ever 10 tonnes of battery you add typically you get to removed ~1 tonne of existing structure. In the case of cars the battery pack is now being used as the floor pan of the car, you could likely do something similar in a...

Be interesting to see how much it would be if contracted more sensibly than HS2 has been to date and whether some of the gold plating can be removed.

You are being a little pessimistic on battery capacity, a good CATL LFP pack is 160wh/kg would be sensible to use 85-90% of that for end of life conditions. If we are designing a purpose built BEMU then we can also normally take 10-15% of the pack mass from the nominal structure of the vehicle...

LFP types can do in the region of 5000-10,000 cycles before they lose 15% of the their capacity. However that measure is normally for full cycles at relatively slow discharge and charge rates. Charging faster will reduce the cyclic life and partial discharges will increase this life. Typically...

Perfect, thanks.

That would get complicated with NDAs and security assessments, I'm just after a guestimate to support doing that.

Regulatory thinking along these lines is on it's way out, regulators are going to be forced to consider broader implications of their policies (make something more expensive and you displace demand onto more dangerous alternatives, is £100m for a Bat Tunnel the most efficient way to save Bats?)...

Pretty simple question (I have searched), what is the approximate cost of a set of friction buffer stops like the ones shown here? https://www.oleo.co.uk/products/buffer-stops/sliding-friction-buffer-stop And then the approximate cost of the hydraulic buffers on their own without the...

To address you first point first, no the idea stems from my own independent curiosity and having a Tesla as part of the package in my old job. I think cars are pretty illustrative of what things are likely to be an issue with a BEMU and what won't be. Space for battery packs is not really an...

Have a look at what modern batteries are able to charge at; the most advanced automotive LFP can charge at 10C peak and about 6C average over a full charge. If we are talking about charging at a terminus then it's likely that we will spec a train with about twice the battery capacity needed to...

If you look at the town designs in the Netherlands, Belgium or Denmark the typical layout for a new town would be that there would be adequate parking for the residents to have plenty of cars, they drive at least as much as we do. The point would be how the roads are arranged with poor inter...

Coefficient of friction for a steel rail/wheel is typically 0.35-0.5 so in theory a BEMU with every wheel powered could accelerate at 3.5-5 ms/s. Typically an EMU like a Class 374 only has about 50% of its wheels powered, so with all the wheels powered we could manage to double acceleration of...

Trying to get data centres to go where the power is cheapest is a bit like suggesting that you personally move 300 miles away to get a cheaper electricity bill. I suspect that you value your friends and family more than your power bill, same is true for data centres. Building proper grid...