You are, of course, absolutely right. Those of us with the longest memories remember when they first came along (Paddington 1967 remodelling I seem to recall). 24x7 working on site, hammered through in minimum time. Then, progressively, it was wondered if we could just do 2-shift working, stick another week on the closure. Bit cheaper for the civils. Then single shift. Another 4 weeks. Loads of time now, gosh, don't even need to work Fridays. That expensive planner who used to work out all the sequencing of everyone can be done away with too. No out-of-hours premium payments to the local concrete batching plant. Of course, there has been no benefit to the cost of the schemes, which continues to rise exponentially ahead of inflation. The real lulu was when the infrastructure provider was broken away from the train operator, and you no longer had the Regional General Manager doing the Regional CCE's performance review. You just say "it's a two month blockade, or ... what shall we say ... eight years of weekend possessions, mate". Nor do you have the current generation of TOC chairmen poking round the site at unplanned times and asking awkward, informed questions of the Site Manager about progress.Bald Rick said:
Hasn't stopped there. Near our home in Canary Wharf, Crossrail closed the DLR station at Custom House (next to Excel) all year in 2017, 12 months, then when it finally reopened (it overran, of course, and most visible site work was done in the final weeks) it still wasn't finished. And guess what, it's never been finished off since, either. Presumably that will need another blockade. I see our local buses now have "Railway Replacement" installed as a standard display in their destination blinds.
Even worse, we now have blockades for electrification, blockades for track replacement, blockades for resignalling, blockades for drainage work, etc, all run by separate teams at separate times.
How did this happen? I blame the local libraries. Time was long ago when they all stocked Thomas the Tank Engine, where at an impressionable age we read the Rev Awdry's homilies on "Think about the passengers ..." when the engines were in any way un-cooperative. That soon made them spring into action. All knocked into some of us from a very early age. But no longer.