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 grade separated tram.
The fact that this scheme has been in the press indicates that there is local interest in doing something, there are much bigger cities with no plans to do anything similar. I was more thinking about the fact that you have thousands of people who work in the rail industry living in the city and around it rather than the bosses at GBR spontaneously deciding to be involved. If only a small proportion of them are lobbying their MP, councillors and the regional mayor then its more likely that something will get done.
There is something called "luck surface area" which is the observation that "lucky" successful people tend to exhibit similar behaviours that increase the chances of fortunate things happening to them. The three examples I gave were reasons why something is more likely to happen in Derby than another similar sized (or larger) urban area that didn't have those factors. It's a probabilistic relationship rather than a deterministic one.
Where do we have any national capability on delivering tram schemes?
The lack of such a centre means that we have a bunch of uncoordinated, expensive schemes built for novice client organisations and any knowledge gained is scattered to the winds once those schemes are complete. I'd argue that building that centre of competence in Derby either in GBR or associated with it would be a better idea than trying to build such a body from scratch somewhere else or within the DfT. As we discuss on this forum regularly rail is due for disruption due to autonomous vehicles and AI adjacent technologies, it would make sense for GBR to actually have some capabilities in those areas too, the longest lived companies do something quite different to what they were founded to do.
It's about building momentum, Derby has GBR, now let's build a tram, now let's build the centre of competence for building trams (or other rapid transit) in the UK, that's the sort of thing that politicians can get behind. I'm actually going to get started on writing letters on this as I live in Derby.
