RAGNARØKR;1345417 said:This discussion really is making you angry. If the people driving this project have got this wrong, and there are many reasons to suspect that they have, then you, as a user of the line are going to have to live with the consequences. The length issue is only one of several question marks over the IEP, and they have been widely discussed elsewhere. At the very least, passengers can expect to be confronted with a long period of teething troubles as these very complex trains settle down and the engineers learn how to deal with them.
You say that you have seen no work in progress relating to lateral clearance, but what sort of work would you expect to see as you travelled past? The work involved - realigning of tracks - would require a blockade, so you are not going to see it on your way in to work.
The original information was in a report, if I recall in Railway Gazette, that referred to various infrastructure works, including construction/modification of depots, and the figure was about £700 million. But I cannot find the reference now. However, the figure of £345 million for ECML which can be trusted is consistent with that overall cost. Whether you call it major depends on what you call major, but it would pay for a lot of trains, for instance.
You can be sure that if it had been possible to run larger vehicles on the system previously, it would have happened. GW got a tranche of oversized Networkers to make the best use of the loading gauge. If you think that running longer vehicles on a tight system is a simple matter, try the plate and ruler test. Get a dinner plate and a ruler, and plot the offset against the distance between where the ruler crosses the rim of the plate as you move the ruler in from the edge.
There seems to be uncertainty about the bogie spacing of these vehicles with various figures being quoted. The normal bogie spacing for a 26 metre vehicle is 20 metres or more ie as close as possible to the ends. There are good reasons for that. A spacing of 18.7 metres will give a similar centre throw to Eurostar, but anything less opens up another set of uncertainties. If, as someone has suggested, the spacing will be 17 metres on the IEP, the exepct, amongst other things, problems with on dynamic performance. The interaction at the interface between adjacent vehicles is critical to ride quality, as was discovered when the mark 4 stock first came into service. The greater the end overhang, the more the movement and stresses at the vehicle ends.
The almost 200 year history of engineering design on the railway is littered with failures. These have almost invariably come about when the designers have attempted to do something that was too different from what had been done previously. In some respects the railway environment is one of the harshest on the planet. Even small modifications can give rise to problems that seemingly pop out from nowhere. The way that IEP has been approached is a recipe for a failure of this kind.
The discussion isn't making me angry. You are.
You ignore things other people say - only the other day, after you claimed there would be endless teething troubles and that a period of test running would be needed, I noted that prototypes will be available two years or so before fleet introduction, so they might manage just that. But you have ignored this and repeated the same assertion. Never mind Hitachi's track record of reliability in Japan and right here, in the UK, with the introduction of the Class 395.
You make statements you cannot support - I think you know which one that is by now - and if work on lateral clearances was going on and required line closures, as The Ham says, passengers would be told about those closures, and the preparations/progress would be obvious from a passing train, like all the work on bridges is obvious as your pass along the line right now. Track engineers don't just set up on the night and then vanish again, especially on, er, "major" projects.
We have heard all this stuff before. Why don't you just write to Hitachi and ask them why they are unaware of all the terrible flaws in their train and see what they have to say? They might even be able to tell you where the bogies will be placed, or give you a plan, so you could get out your plate and ruler.