Network Rail to restart electrification of train lines
 

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

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

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.

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

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. :rolleyes:

BW