How does this cost 9m£? I mean, sure, it was exploratory, but come on, how do you spend that kind of money on sealing some components, adding an alternator and some sensors? What am I missing?
People don't work for free. Industrial-grade items are expensive.
You can't just seal some components. You have to seal those components then conduct rigorous and extensive testing of those components to make sure they're actually sealed. Then you have to document the process.
An alternator on a steam locomotive isn't a little thing you can hold in your hands and get from an auto parts store for next to nothing.
Here is one of the two new "alternators" installed on 60163 Tornado: https://www.a1steam.com/tornado/news/tornado-details/doublin...
I'm a hardware guy. The number 1 thing software guys don't get about hardware is that everything you do costs a shit-ton of money. You can't just download a hardware IDE, register a hardware domain, and vibe code your way to a hardware startup.
Well, you can, but the technical term for that is "kickstarter scam".
Conversion 2 will be less expensive than 1, conversion 3 will be less expensive than 2, and by the time they get to the 500th conversion it'll be practically cheap.
> The cab was stripped back to bare metal because of the sheer number of new conduits, boxes and equipment and that was the only practical way to do it
And the system has to be homologated, which takes a lot of time to test in a unknown environment.