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Plans for the depot(s) are a pretty important part of any new rolling stock order. The new BEMU order will mean no more suburban diesels around Edinburgh. The remaining self-powered trains would just be long distance ones to Aberdeen and Inverness. Since Haymarket handles more than just the HST...

A point to remember here - the legal authority to build the tram on the Roseburn Path already exists or existed. It may have lapsed, but the principle is pretty solid. Those opposed to the Roseburn Path route would need to explain why something which is/was until recently the law of the land is...

https://maps.nls.uk/geo/explore/#zoom=14.6&lat=55.95279&lon=-3.22485&layers=6&b=ESRIWorld&o=100 There wasn't a great deal of development north/west of the Water of Leith until after WW1. Queensferry Road tapered out pretty quickly after Buckingham and Learmonth Terraces, so there was no real...

The steelwork is cheap. It's the clearance work to raise bridges or lower the track which is expensive. I recall reading somewhere that the link at Coatbridge Sunnyside is useful as a way to connect the WCML and North Clyde power supplies. If it weren't there, there would be a 25kV cable buried...

Bere Ferrers rail accident This was a problem even a hundred years ago. The British rail network, especially around London, is far busier than many people from abroad are used to. Accidents just don't happen any more; in India there were 21,000 railway fatalities in 2022.

https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ssi/2025/81/made

The best land for new homes already has homes on it. You don't need to wait for new sewers and roads and railways to be built if you knock down existing lower density houses and replace them with flats. We don't do it because our planning system deliberately makes it hard to do so. The only time...

Houses get built on floodplains because various forces have prevented them being built on the best possible sites. In almost all cases, these sites already have private owner-occupied housing on them. Indeed, a good chunk of the demand for housing on commuter rail lines out of London is just...

A lot will depend on exactly where the sensors are and the timings for the lights, as well as the maximum possible speed through the junctions. A recurring problem in the US is that traffic engineers are optimising for overall vehicle speed above pretty much anything else. Adding in chicanes or...

How often do bus drivers go through red lights at junctions or pedestrian crossings? Adding an otherwise unnecessary pelican crossing might help here, if connected to an overheight vehicle detector. The reason for the pedestrian crossing is simple - it's a thing that drivers are already...

Having multiple stations for a single built-up area makes a lot of sense for high speed rail. If nothing else, the time penalty from another stop isn't as severe when you're already running slower anyway. Even without OOC, it's unlikely HS2 trains would be running >230km/h directly out of...

Quality of life is why we need to embrace redevelopment. The existing buildings are crap. Our current policy of not allowing redevelopment means there's essentially a cap on the number of rentable sq ft available. You can't add much more sq ft without knocking down a building and replacing it...

Euston will remain impossible to deliver until the government finally understands that the area surrounding the station is ripe for redevelopment, and market forces are screaming out for it. The idea that protected sightlines are so important that the government must spend literal tens of...

The airport makes no money from flights at all. Ryanair doesn't care about how much it costs to get to the airport but they do very much care about how much the airport charges. Their advertised flight fares do not need to include the cost of anything other than the service they are providing...

The kWh is an awful unit to end up in common use. 1 kWh is 1000W over 60x60 seconds, so 3,600,000J or 3.6MJ. That isn't any better, although it removes some of the confusion with kW for power. BMW tried using Ah (ampere-hour, dimensionally equivalent to coulombs) for the i3 possibly to sidestep...

Electric units also mean going to a suburban door layout, so it'll be easier even if the train is crush loaded.

Our existing development principles mean flightpaths free from housing will, very soon, end up being filled with housing. The only real exception would be flightpaths over open water. Demand for housing is always there, and if we can't replace existing housing, then it'll eventually end up near...

The best way to fund infrastructure improvements is with development, as the two can enable one another. Had East Kilbride been built more recently, then the line may well have been doubled and electrified as part of it given the scale of the town. If all you want to do is turn more farmland...

37:48 Watching these old videos about the pre-modernisation Subway I'm curious whether the stations were extended as part of the work. I had it in my head that the original station platforms were only long enough for the original 2-car trains but that video suggests some were a bit longer...

Section 106 agreements aren't a sustainable solution to fund public services, including public transport improvements. The reason they exist is primarily because local authorities have pretty much no other financial levers available. One of the few things that we have allowed local authorities...