> It's also not a low cost thing, the SSLs resignalling cost at least £1.6bn and has been horrendously delayed.
Pardon my ignorance, but how can a signaling system cost that much money? Is it made out of gold and platinum or what?
Pardon my ignorance, but how can a signaling system cost that much money? Is it made out of gold and platinum or what?
1) very complicated and drawn out design/approval processes with many expensive consultants involved. on network rail you would not believe the amount of studies they have to do, including testing the light levels everywhere in a carpark to make sure there are no dark spots, amongst a billion other small things. there has been endless regulation forced on the railways/tfl, which on one hand is good for safety but on the other has meant even a tiny project needs a trillion risk assessments done, which typically get outsourced to specialist consultants, who have a massive incentive to find problems so they can retest.
2) lack of competition at the top level contractor layer. the procurement rules require really only huge companies can bid, which means they can act in a semi-cartel way. this is probably difficult to solve given signalling stuff but in more basic construction projects it feels like not much competition is going on (not suggesting there is a cartel here, fwiw, just feels a bit like it!)
3) on the tube the access is extremely restrictive. you tend not to close the line for extended periods of time (though this is changing recently as i think people are realising the cost of keeping the line isn't worth it vs doing a week closure), which means that you have to get all your equipment down to the tunnel (which might taken an hour), do 2-3 hours of work, then remove all the equipment, in 4-5 hour blocks each night between midnight and 5amish, which means you are paying people often "night working" wages for working really 2 hour shifts, instead of paying them normal wages for working through the day for 8 hour shifts. This probably increases the cost of labour by 5-10x.
Proving that it fails safely requires a mountain of effort and documentation, but it's required because failure doesn't just lead to some speculative CPU bugs leaking a password or to a browser crash, it leads to many people dying.
Aren't we talking about physical signalling kit - no copying and pasting? 272 stations and ~400km of track - a lot of which is pretty difficult to access?
Having a common design does help but it doesn't help that much as most of the problems are with the physical realities of each location - and what I did was much simpler and less critical than signalling.
It is not ever 'just'. This isn't copying code. This isn't building identical silicon for multiple end users. This is more like trying to add additional threads to something that is not embarrassingly parallel. What you're saying is like saying 'why can't you just make all of my computer programs run on all 32 of my CPU cores?'.
And even if you minimise the increasing complexity added by expanding the system, waterfall-style design (which is absolutely the most appropriate approach when dealing with these sorts of projects) front-end loads a frankly Herculean amount of risk management into the process because you want to make sure that's all absolutely square and true before you progress to implementation.
Lastly, it's worth noting that with systems this complex, a lot of the detail is bespoke because the number of complicating input variables the system is exposed to necessarily requires a relatively bespoke solution. Yes, the idea of e.g. ETCS being ETCS is going to hold, but how that works in reality, how it ties in to all of the other legacy systems, etc. will mean that you can't for example just take ETCS-equipped train A and and drop it into ETCS-equipped network B.
This is a line that has 53 stations. For comparison that’s 20 more stations than the longest and highest volume L line in Chicago.
I wonder how this cost benefit compares to the $9 billion project to widen Houston highways?
I used to commute 5 times a week (often more) on Piccadilly. So that’s £5,200 for my ridership for the year? From that perspective seems rather expensive…
It’s disappointing they ditched the signal upgrades. It will bite everyone soon enough. Some of these systems date back over a hundred years, and are all incredibly bespoke.
Re the missed stations, I feel like they missed an opportunity with the Elizabeth Line line to shift more Heathrow traffic that way, giving some breather to Piccadilly during signal upgrades.
£5200 for your annual ridership but then divide that by the lifespan of the signaling. Let’s say it lasts 30 years, so that’s €173, (but of course, at the end of the 30 years £173 is worth a lot less).
The only reason I compare it to America is because I don't actually know the figures for the UK, but I expect that car owners would spend more there due to higher cost of petrol, higher vehicle taxes, etc.
That's why I don't think they compare well: many people who use public transport, even the Tube or similar, still need a car, at least sometimes. So it's not an alternative, and it's not equivalent value.
I think the answer is that solving this problem takes a teak of some size and skill, and paying them while making a hefty profit is expensive.