Fortsätt till huvudinnehåll

Long-distance train scheme suffers setbacks


The starting blocks...
Originally uploaded by Thrash Merchant

The replacement programme for Britain's high speed trains runs from crisis to crisis. The project, to replace Britain's high speed electric trains (left) and its high speed diesel trains (right) is being managed by the Department of Transport, who have specified a light weight train capable of running at 140 mph, under electric power where the lines are electrified and under diesel power where they are not.

Alstom (builders of the TGV and Eurostar) has already pulled out of the bidding process. A consortium of the Canadian based giant, Bombardier, and German arch-competitor Siemens (builder of the German ICE train), has refused, in its bid, to comply with all the DfT conditions. Which leaves the Japanese firm Hitachi, which has just added new members to its consortium.

This has been a troubled project from its inception. The concept sounds plain wrong. It is untried, inherently complex and liable to run into prolonged teething troubles. The additional costs of 140 mph running are not worth the time savings in a country the size of Britain, especially when the competing modes are being hit by rising energy prices.

Once 125 mph or even 100 mph running is accepted as standard, the problem becomes so much more manageable. All that is then needed is a fleet of carriages, which might take the form of articulated sets, with driving trailers so that the locomotive does not need to be at the front of the train. These should be standardised so that they can operate freely with the existing fleet of mark 3 stock which is good for many more years. What is then required is a fleet of diesel locomotives and a fleet of electric locomotives. These would be based on a manufacturer's existing standard type. Where lines are electrified the trains can be hauled or pushed by electric locomotives and where they are not, diesel locomotives would be used. The cost of the necessary track alterations to enable quick changeovers are minute compared with the kind of costs that are entailed in the DfT's project.

That way, the chronic shortage of stock on Brtain's railways would be overcome and valuable flexibility gained. This is needed, on the one hand to respond to changing demands, and on the other, to enable the railways to adapt to technical changes, in particular the spread of electrification over the system. One has to ask what the civil servants were thinking of when they came up with this idea. £10 million has already been spent in consultancy fees on the project, and of course they were not going to say it was a bad idea even if they thought it.

Read FT article on subject

Etiketter:

Kommentarer

Skicka en kommentar

Populära inlägg i den här bloggen

Importing people to sustain demand

I got involved in a discussion with a Youtuber called “Philosophy all along”. This was in connection with criticism of Trump’s policy of deporting illegal migrants, which he argued would be bad for the economy as it would reduce demand. This implies that there is a need to import people to sustain demand. There is no obvious reason why a population should not be able to consume everything that the same population produces. If it can not, then something else is going on. It is a basic principle that wages are the least that workers will accept to do a job. Wages are a share of the value added by workers through their wages. The remainder is distributed as economic rent, after government has taken its cut in taxes. Monopoly profit is a temporary surplus that after a delay gets absorbed into economic rent. Land values in Silicon Valley are an example of this; it's like a gold rush. The miners get little out of it. Rent and tax syphon purchasing power away from those who produce the g...
Skicka en kommentar
Läs mer

The dreadfulness of British governance

I wrote to my MP on two entirely separate issues recently. The first was to do with the replacement for the Inter City 125 train, which at £2.6 million per vehicle, is twice as expensive as it ought to be. The second concerned the benefits of a switch from business rate and Council Tax to a tax based on site values. In both cases, the replies were full of spurious, unsubstantiated assertions and completely flawed arguments. This is typical. You will not get an iota of sense from the government on any area of public policy at all - finance, economics, trade and employment, agriculture, housing, health, transport, energy. All junk. If you write to your MP you will invariably receive answers that are an insult to your intelligence, no matter what subject you are writing about. Of course they cannot understand statistics. They are innumerate. Whitehall is staffed with idiots with a high IQ. Look at their IT projects. And mind your purse, they will have that too.
Skicka en kommentar
Läs mer

How much more will the British tolerate?

The British are phlegmatic, tolerant and slow to rouse. Thus there was no great reaction after the terrorist attack in July 2005. The murder of Lee Rigby created a sense of outrage, but nothing more, since it appeared to be an isolated incident. Two serious incidents within a fortnight are another matter. Since the first major terrorist incident in 2001, authority has tried to persuade the public that Islam is a religion of peace, that these were isolated events, or the actions of deranged "lone wolves", having nothing to do with Islam, or to reassure that the chances of being killed in a terrorist attack were infinitesimally small. These assurances are are beginning to wear thin. They no longer convince. If government does not act effectively, people will take the law into their own hands. What, however, would effective action look like? What sort of effective action would not amount to rough justice for a lot of innocent people? Given the difficulties of keeping large n...
Skicka en kommentar
Läs mer