tbtc
Veteran Member
I'm looking for false economies - times when projects could have delivered a lot more for only a marginal (e.g. 5%) increase to the budget.
Maybe there were good reasons for the failure to go slightly further at the time (e.g. travel patterns have since changed, we had no idea of future demand, significant house building has changed the nature of a line), maybe there were pressures on costs and someone trimmed the project back to try to keep things on budget, maybe things were never feasible at the time (e.g. a rolling stock manufacturer might have only been able to deliver "x" carriages due to production line pressures, even if it'd have been a lot better if they had build "x + 5%").
Sometimes there will have been justification for things, sometimes it only becomes apparent in hindsight, but I thought a thread might come up with some examples. Please note that this isn't about the kind of "how great XC would have been if Virgin had ordered twice as many Voyagers and they'd all been eight coaches long" / "Beeching should have kept thousands of additional miles of lines open"/ "we should electrify every line in the country" suggestions, it's about very limited ways that could have delivered more (or minor cuts that delivered a disproportionate reduction in benefit). I know that it'd have been better if the 60x4 coach 185s had been built as planned (rather than scaled back to 51x3 coaches with a handful of two coach 170s sourced as a makeweight) - I'd rather that the GWML electrification had gone to all the way to Oxford/ Bristol/ Swansea (rather than stopping at Didcot/ Wooton Bassett/ Cardiff) - but these aren't just minor cuts - I'm more interested in times when projects that fell tantalisingly short of delivering as much as they could have.
Too late now to do much about these things - e.g. the production line of a particular class closes down, it'd be uneconomic to open it up for the sake of a couple of additional trains, you could build more identical ones as regulations have changed since then (e.g. emissions, accessibility) - the electrification team did the main line at the time and it'd be uneconomic to put together a new one just to wire up a short branchline - water under the bridge now - but when could a couple of quid more spent at the time have had a much bigger impact?
Examples I was thinking of:
(I've said 5% above - I appreciate that we don't always know the cost of what may appear a marginal addition to a project - I'm aware that two further 333s would have been more than 5% of the EMU fleet that ATN had - but I mention 5% to give a kind of ball park figure - this is about modest savings/increases rather than getting the crayons out and suggesting that we should have spent billions more on a project)
- New fleet orders that were just a couple of units too short to cover the PVR, meaning that some old trains had to be kept in service
- Electrification that would have delivered significantly more if they'd just wired one station beyond where the wires currently end, or didn't include one chord of a junction/ siding/ passing loop
- Line closures that perplexingly kept most of a branch open whilst closing the busy station at the end
- Routes built with single track sections that would now cost a lot of money to double but it'd have been a lot cheaper at the time the line was built
- "Diesel Islands" (where it'd have been cheaper in the long run to wire a branch than keep a small DMU fleet for a specific duty)
- Ordering slightly too few trains for a line meant that a service had to be diagramed at a slower speed to accommodate other trains (e.g. you might have to time a service for 75mph since you occasionally have to substitute a 150/156 in place of the 90mph 158s that ought to run most duties)
Maybe there were good reasons for the failure to go slightly further at the time (e.g. travel patterns have since changed, we had no idea of future demand, significant house building has changed the nature of a line), maybe there were pressures on costs and someone trimmed the project back to try to keep things on budget, maybe things were never feasible at the time (e.g. a rolling stock manufacturer might have only been able to deliver "x" carriages due to production line pressures, even if it'd have been a lot better if they had build "x + 5%").
Sometimes there will have been justification for things, sometimes it only becomes apparent in hindsight, but I thought a thread might come up with some examples. Please note that this isn't about the kind of "how great XC would have been if Virgin had ordered twice as many Voyagers and they'd all been eight coaches long" / "Beeching should have kept thousands of additional miles of lines open"/ "we should electrify every line in the country" suggestions, it's about very limited ways that could have delivered more (or minor cuts that delivered a disproportionate reduction in benefit). I know that it'd have been better if the 60x4 coach 185s had been built as planned (rather than scaled back to 51x3 coaches with a handful of two coach 170s sourced as a makeweight) - I'd rather that the GWML electrification had gone to all the way to Oxford/ Bristol/ Swansea (rather than stopping at Didcot/ Wooton Bassett/ Cardiff) - but these aren't just minor cuts - I'm more interested in times when projects that fell tantalisingly short of delivering as much as they could have.
Too late now to do much about these things - e.g. the production line of a particular class closes down, it'd be uneconomic to open it up for the sake of a couple of additional trains, you could build more identical ones as regulations have changed since then (e.g. emissions, accessibility) - the electrification team did the main line at the time and it'd be uneconomic to put together a new one just to wire up a short branchline - water under the bridge now - but when could a couple of quid more spent at the time have had a much bigger impact?
Examples I was thinking of:
- Lack of electrification on the Felixstowe branch. When BR wired up the GEML and associated branches, it would only have been around ten additional miles to get down the branch from Ipswich to the docks. Given how busy it is with freight nowadays, I wonder if it was considered for wiring at the time?
- The order of 333s being just enough to replace the 308s, leaving the various versions of "Northern" with a handful of 321s to run the hourly Leeds - Doncaster service (they had three 321s to run a service with a PVR of two, since the tiny 321 fleet meant they needed a spare unit, but maybe just two additional 333s would have been a much more efficient use of stock, given that a bigger fleet of 333s wouldn't have needed the 50% contingency that the 321s had)
- ECML electrification (which was an ambitious project, going all the way from London to Carstairs via York/ Newcastle/ Edinburgh) not having the budget for a few minor extensions like the spur at Morpeth that local trains reverse in (although finding money to wire up the headshunt at the eastern side of Berwick station) - in the context of the overall budget you could have included from the Metro Centre to Sunderland for only fifteen miles of wiring - maybe fans of "diversionary resilience" would want the old route at Selby to have been included?
(I've said 5% above - I appreciate that we don't always know the cost of what may appear a marginal addition to a project - I'm aware that two further 333s would have been more than 5% of the EMU fleet that ATN had - but I mention 5% to give a kind of ball park figure - this is about modest savings/increases rather than getting the crayons out and suggesting that we should have spent billions more on a project)