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Comment by gsnedders | Hacker News Reader

In Scotland at least the abysmal project management of the (new) Edinburgh trams has likely killed any chance of more new tram lines in Scotland (I don't think any party has new tram lines in their manifesto for next month's elections).

For those who don't know, it was budgeted at £375 million, and eventually opened in a cut-back scheme (with about half the route cancelled) at £776 million.

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It was something of an administrative nightmare in that it was paid for by Holyrood and project managed by the local council. There's an inquiry into the causes of the failure which has also run over budget, absurdly. But I don't think it's entirely dead, there are still noises about extending it into Leith sometime in the next decade.

Meanwhile the Borders railway appears to have opened successfully - and is immediately full at commuting times. I hope they left enough space to double track it.

> Meanwhile the Borders railway appears to have opened successfully - and is immediately full at commuting times. I hope they left enough space to double track it.

Not for all of it was — there's certainly provision in places, but there's also parts where doubling would be incredibly expensive (the viaducts especially, where the maximum dimensions of the trains it has been built for are larger than it was originally built for, are inherently single-track now).

Several of the completely new bridges were built with single track capacity as well. I suspect the government thought they were being a bit clever forcing Network Rail to shave a few million off the cost this way, but actually just not laying the second set of rails doesn't really save much so actually the savings came in places where they will cause a lot of pain later

There's passive provision (ie: at not a lot of extra cost - perhaps no real new infrastructure, not entirely sure) to run a 4tph service to Gorebridge + continue half of them to the rest of the line.

I think a 4tph / 2tph service pattern is fine and future capacity could be gained by platform extensions + longer trains.

I'd rather they 'value engineer' it to that level now than build a double track railway at significantly extra cost, and spend the ~£100m (educated guess) on other railway improvement projects for other areas (eg, the quad tracking of the ECML near Musselburgh to allow them a 2tph service - will cost around £100m for the various improvements).

To be fair it was budgeted at £450m when it was approved and the work started. Current expectations are that because all the preparatory work was done, and the trams and track were already bought, the route can be completed to Leith for about £100m (in 2007 prices), so overall it's coming in at somewhat less than double the expected price. The reasons were a combination of poor project/contractor management and significant unexpected difficulties with utilities.

It doesn't really seem in this case that the budget overrun is the most controversial bit. The sting in the tail is that it resulted in the duplication of existing bus routes with an infrequent service and a comparable travel time. As an MVP it is terrible - what would the Show HN comments be like? "did you even identify your target market?"

The more disappointing part is that it tends to poison the well for ambitious public transport projects in future. That Leith extension will come some time after the Last Trumpet.

But, you know, just as long as RBS got their lovely public funded tram linking Gogar Deathstar to town then it was all worth it.

Every time I've been on it it's been busy and reasonably fast, an impression which is well backed up by the usage stats. Definitely speeds up a lot of journeys from Edinburgh park. My impression is that most of the criticism comes from people heading to the airport where the bus is still by far the best option, although even then trams successfully drag people onto public transport who have strong prejudices about buses.

It is pathetic slow. This trams should travel 70-100km/h not 40km/h. It is also almost empty between 10-16 when people are at work in banks (Gogarburn, Gyle). Ticket system is also ridiculous, you need to validate you card twice.

Where does the 40km/h speed come from? As far as I'm aware, much of the system allows 70 km/h operation.

The speed from the airport down to the depot is pretty shocking, mostly because it takes a whole bunch of ridiculously tight turns. Once it's through that it picks up quite a lot. Never seems to zoom along, although as much as anything else I think that's because it's a much smoother ride than the bus.

> The speed from the airport down to the depot is pretty shocking, mostly because it takes a whole bunch of ridiculously tight turns.

That's true, though it's only c. 3km of the 14km route. Certainly the 10km/h restriction round those bends makes it seem crazy slow and impedes progress out there. (I originally wrote, though deleted it, a question wondering how big the time saving would be; perhaps a minute?)

The section beyond Murryfield is mostly straight and it does get up to a fair speed between stops, which are mostly about 1km apart. It's the crawl around Murryfield (due to having to take a circular route around the edge of Haymarket (railway) depot) and the curves out by the airport that really kill any feeling of speed, though, no matter how fast it gets up elsewhere.

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