After the recent publicity testing, I was hoping to be riding it before Easter, now it looks like even the core part will take until June or even later.
It’s hilarious this is so many years behind schedule. It’s also why I don’t think nuclear is the answer - as a country the U.K. can’t do big projects.
I find the reasons for the delay interesting. The "root cause" is arguably not signalling or station fit out, it's the fact that the senior management essentially didn't understand the processes or how progress was being made or not made.
Under the original CEO it was going to be delivered in 2018 right up until mid 2018 when they were like "oh sorry, maybe early 2019?". This was a CEO with basically no construction experience who rarely set foot on site.
They replaced the CEO a few years ago with someone who has a long career in construction, who understood what it takes to build a railway, who really knows the details, and who is on site, in the weeds, understanding the progress at a very granular level. Since he's taken over the communication has been much better, much more consistent, and felt much more honest. He wouldn't commit to a date, but has progressively shortened the window again and again as they've got closer to completion, and maybe this is naive, but I fully believe that they'll hit the goal of "first half of 2022".
It is a few years late, but on a 10 year program. And it is only around 25% over budget. That is a lot of money to be sure. But compared to other government or corporate programs it seems pretty good. And it will deliver real measurable benefits to people. Both in terms of travel and economic stimulus. The UK is probably spending more on failed corporate ERP systems every year than the over spend on Crossrail.
And we can do manor projects because we are doing major projects. There is Thames Tideway, London Power Tunnels, several offshore wind farms and interconnectors, Great Western electrification, 2012 Olympics.
Let's not forget Hinckley C being built and possibly the go-ahead for Sizewell C later this year. Both projects are vital in the fight against climate change. I'd sleep easier at nights if we could build two more in addition and mini reactors dotted around the country.
Being 25% over budget when the programme is already extortionately expensive compared to similar infrastructure projects in other countries. And each time we do "another one" it's even more expensive than the last. There is an entire industry purpose designed for ripping off the tax payer.
> extortionately expensive compared to similar infrastructure projects in other countries
Can you make a few comparisons to similar infrastructure projects in other countries to illustrate this point? Make sure those countries have similar safety protections for workers, and labour rights, of course.
I can trump that! Maybe 1990(ish) - I worked as a cycle courier in London and one of my regular clients was Crossrail where I carried plans from one office to another.
> It’s hilarious this is so many years behind schedule. It’s also why I don’t think nuclear is the answer - as a country the U.K. can’t do big projects.
Maybe they’re great at building, poor at scheduling. If they’d +4 year’ed the initial timeline, they’d be “on time”?
We see this in the world of IT. A team will be set an X month timeline by a sponsor who is well in the knowledge that it will take Y months, but who strongly hold some belief (which I do not share) that giving less time, which will have to be extended through painful negotiation, will result in a shorter timeframe than if they’d given Y months expectation.
For major projects like Crossrail you also run into the politics of it. Politicians are short term incentivised. They have budget cycles. etc.
I think a lot of cultural arguments for xyz can't "build" (that word really grinds my gears as it reminds of me of smug pseudo-classicists on twitter) are basically bullshit.
The issue the UK has as far as I'm concerned is that we have a political and managerial class who are basically disinterested in the grand scale.
We don't spend much money, we try to shelve what little we do spend (e.g. we have two aircraft carriers rather than the one that was rumoured for a while, has the world blow up?), Our government is one of the happiest to sell off state assets ever, and now our current government ran out of ideological steam about 7 years ago so we are stuck with a collection of lunatics and retards in power.
I used to be pretty firmly in the "don't tell people they're voting against their own interests" camp, but I was wrong. Our electorate is given a sword to fall on (FPTP), but chooses to jump on the sword rather than make a fuss.
Politicians love big projects. It is much more tangible than most government programs. Your draw a line of a map and then a real change happens in the world. And this government have put much more money into infrastructure than you might expect given their ideology. In fact industry have trouble getting enough capacity to support projects like HS2. And often in less sexy areas like rail electrification, smart motorways etc.
Also in my experience the human aspect of projects is always the most difficult part. The most amazing thing about a company like SpaceX is not the technical achievement. But getting thousands of people to work together on a single goal. And arguably this kind of thing is less problematic in large projects than in the rest of society. But the effects of bad communication is far more visible and explicit. Engineering cuts through and delivers because it actually simplifies things.
"And this government have put much more money into infrastructure than you might expect given their ideology... And often in less sexy areas like rail electrification, smart motorways etc."
On what basis? They've scaled down HS2 and the Northern Rail Plan. Smart motorways is purely a way to avoid expensive, complicated, often necessary road widening with an unsafe technological solution. A lot of the safety issues of smart motorways has also been due to cutting costs - less frequent emergency refuge areas, less cameras than are needed to detect accidents. Now the press has caught up to them they have stopped rolling them out entirely.
Its more that I am surprised they started these projects in the first place.
I agree that smart motorways are less safe, and there are better ways to reduce demand (like road pricing). Having said that motorways are still very safe compared to other roads, even after being made "smart". I think a modest reduction in safety is an acceptable price to pay if billions can be saved. Invest that money in reducing death from emissions, pedestrian safety, or even our far less safe A road network.
You are correct, you much more likely to be killed on a regauar A road. My comment was really about the attitude of drivers rather than the statistical/actual risk.
I absolutely hate smart motorways. Dangerous and a proven killer at the worst possible time. Even emergency services can't get through quickly if the traffic is backed up and there's been a bad traffic collision as there's no hard shoulder for them to use.
> it looks like even the core part will take until June or even later.
> It’s hilarious this is so many years behind schedule
it’s 4 years behind schedule, 2 of those were covid. not bad, not good.
> It’s also why I don’t think nuclear is the answer - as a country the U.K. can’t do big projects.
crossrail was the biggest european construction project. huge undertaking, and with only 4 years behind schedule. for a western project this is pretty good actually.
hinkley point c is just 6 month behind schedule.
but usually if you’re building something huge in a western country then expect huge delays.
Building the physical tunnels (and the trains for that matter) isn’t why Crossrail is behind schedule. Those were both pretty much delivered on schedule.
Apparently the delays are mainly due to station fit outs (Bond Street station will still not be ready for the initial opening), and issues with the signalling systems - including software delays.
In fairness, rumour has it that the station fit outs were an avoidable screw up.
Supposedly the detailed design work was behind schedule so they started the physical building work "at risk". Because it was not well planned, it was done in the wrong order - installing cabling before moving a wall so the new cables have to be ripped out along with the old wall for instance. It was alleged that this was done deliberately by the subcontractors to create additional paid work.
A few years ago, recognizing that the project management was a huge mess, there were a lot of big changes and the project management team have been running a events in london showing off the real time project tracking they've put in place.
Presumably, Covid hasn't heled either.
I remember these radio problems from when I was interviewing for rail automation jobs 20 years ago. They were having this exact problem on the jubilee line. The tunnels seem to be an amazingly harsh environment, and the safety requirements seem much harsher than for self driving cars or human train drivers.
> "It was alleged that this was done deliberately by the subcontractors to create additional paid work."
I don't entirely doubt this. I actually briefly lived in a flat overlooking the Hayes & Harlington station works some years ago. And also used to often commute to the Prince Regent DLR station which had a good view of the Crossrail works at Custom House. In both cases, as far as I could tell, progress was very slow with typically large amounts of idle workers and equipment sitting around (workers on-site but seemingly without much to do!).
> "They were having this exact problem on the jubilee line."
And Crossrail's signalling is, of course, much more complicated compared to the self-contained Jubilee line because of the need for interoperation with the wider rail network and for trains to run on 3(!) totally different signalling systems: Siemens' proprietary TrainGuard ATO on the central (Paddington-Abbey Wood) section, traditional British TPWS & AWS on the Reading and Stratford branches, and ETCS on the Heathrow branch.
I can certainly imagine that getting all of these systems to work together has been a systems integration nightmare, so it's worrying that they seem to be struggling just to get the core Paddington-Abbey Wood section running in self-contained operation!
This was the same with Berlin's latest (and currently last) subway project, U5 extension. While much shorter, the stations also were behind schedule, and the line operated for a few months without the intermittent stations being open.
Which countries are better at it? The UK has very little (if any) greenfield development opportunities left. You really have to keep things in context. This is a tunnel under London, not some viaduct across bare meadows. One thing you learn in engineering before long is the enormous cost of existing development/infrastructure. You can't always wipe the slate clean and start again even if we'd all like to sometimes.
> ”it looks like even the core part will take until June or even later.”
If it goes beyond June then it will be extremely embarrassing for all involved. They’ve repeatedly promised “first half of 2022”, and reaffirmed that very recently.
I feel like we have quite a lot of big projects on the go. Crossrail, Thames Tideway, HS2 phase 1, Hinkley C, Hornsea and Dogger Bank offshore wind farms and likely Sizewell C and Heathrow expansion soon too. Plus there are a ton of smaller but still big projects going on up and down the country.
Obviously major projects often run into issues. Being that we're a democratic, densely populated country with a lot of history buried under our feet, we perhaps face more political issues than most. Nevertheless, I think saying we can't do big projects is a bit of an exaggeration.
They still have some know-how based on legacy nuclear power plants and military reactors (which I'm guessing is what Rolls-Royce will build on) but at the moment they cannot build a civil nuclear power plant from scratch by themselves.
This is actually tricky beyond the design and certification. You need the whole industrial capacity as well. For instance, the French government has repeatedly made sure that a specific steel mill in the country remains operational because it is the only one large enough and with the required equipment to manufacture the huge steel domes encasing the nuclear reactor cores...
The original High Speed rail from St Pancras to Paris seemed to have gone quite well.
Crossrail appears to have had bonuses to the original management for constructing the tunnels, I’m not too sure on the details but what is far more galling that the illusion of a Dec 2018 carried on to a few months before.
Warning I’ve just read snippets following this, so following could well be wrong:
Seemingly enough time had been scheduled to run the trains to shake out systems, as well as finish building.
Bond Street build was delayed due to the site being tight, the original contractors were replaced by TfL itself.
Enough time to run tests on the fittings so that the could be proven to be in compliance hadn’t be catered for. If this was an issue I would have thought that could have been started much earlier.
Signalling issues, as mentioned. The trains have to integrate with three different signalling systems.
I believe Project Management itself grew from the UK government having early issues with delivery. Systems aren’t getting any simpler.
A society that can plan, fund, build, and maintain large to huge infrastructure projects would have a huge advantage.
The UK has done plenty of big projects just as well and often better than anyone else but I think the problem nowadays is twofold:
1) Health and safety legislation has evolved to an extent where construction companies can simply not take risks. Of course, this is a great thing if you're a construction worker who enjoys going home to his/her family each night but it does mean that big projects become bogged-down in planning and ensuring that nothing can possibly go wrong from a safety aspect.
2) Sub-contracting of specialist roles where you (as a main contractor) are reliant on multiple partners all being on top of their game and focused on the end goal when, in reality, everyone is out for themselves and happy to sabotage progress for the sake of an easy profit, ego boost or backstabbing opportunity.
From the outside these kind of projects always look easy but from the inside it's a wonder that anything actually gets done.
> in reality, everyone is out for themselves and happy to sabotage progress for the sake of an easy profit, ego boost or backstabbing opportunity.
Oftentimes these sorts of problems aren't due to malice but occur because of unintended consequences of poorly-defined service-level agreements and KPIs for separate contractors whose services have to integrate for overall success.
I was embedded once at a UK Army base that ran in effect a military college for different trades. The on-site restaurant was part of a UK-wide contract that had nationally agreed contracted opening times. These inflexible eating hours were actually the main constraint on when physical education could occur. A single supplier company had two separate contracts to supply instructors and equipment maintenance staff. The maintainers had KPIs that were (again) part of a national level contract that worked against the instructors when important things needed to be quickly repaired.
How much of the change the UK needs could it get without a change in its managerial class? As you as say here ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30810537 ), FPTP is a factor in the UK's problems; without it, wouldn't the current managerial class have more of the incentives and the scrutiny they need to make good policy?
It’s hilarious this is so many years behind schedule. It’s also why I don’t think nuclear is the answer - as a country the U.K. can’t do big projects.