Network Rail to restart electrification of train lines

[pre65]

The electrification of two railway lines is to be restarted after the projects were halted so a review could be carried out, the government says.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-34402592

[Beeyar Wunby]

Originally Posted by Aunty Beeb

Shadow transport secretary, Lilian Greenwood, said: "We warned ministers for months that these projects were at risk, but they cynically waited until after the election to withdraw support."

Ministers had been forced to change course after an "outcry" from passengers after the projects were stopped, she added.

Ms Greenwood accused the government of "incompetence", saying the delays had led to a "damaging hiatus, which had seen construction job losses and resources shifted to other projects".

Yup. It's not often I agree with Beeb but they seem to have got the measure of this lot.

[Tony]

To electrify 60 miles of the cross Pennine route will take 7 years to complete! Spain, which was brought to its knees by the financial crash, is in the process of building 450 miles of High Speed railway from scratch in three years!
Who is telling porkies to the UK public? It makes one despair.

[pre65]

Surely building whilst a line is in action will ALWAYS take longer than starting from scratch ?

[Beeyar Wunby]

Originally Posted by Tony

To electrify 60 miles of the cross Pennine route will take 7 years to complete! Spain, which was brought to its knees by the financial crash, is in the process of building 450 miles of High Speed railway from scratch in three years!
Who is telling porkies to the UK public? It makes one despair.

Sounds perfectly reasonable to me.

It would take 6 years and 3 months for the army of several hundred solicitors, accountants, managers, facilitators, consultants, contractors, sub-contractors, sub-sub-contractors, etc to work out a plan for action. All this would cost billions because these are very expensive people to employ.

Nice work if you can get it !

Then a team of 20 technicans working on a ridiculously tight timescale and tiny budget would have to work like stink and take 9 months to bang up the stanchions and string the knitting together. When they'd finished they would be cited as the reason that the whole project had taken so long and overrun by so much.

Been there, done that.

BW