[cryptopian]

I was discussing railways to somebody and noting how at-capacity the British network is. He was adamant that we just hadn't optimised the system enough and that more maths and more software was needed. I tried my best to explain that we had in fact done that, and that in the end, there's no getting around the bottleneck of moving 100 tonne vehicles along a finite set of steel rails.

[pjc50]

You could apply clever modelling to work out what minimal set of upgrades would best increase capacity .. and then spend the next 30 years trying to get one line built.

We're stuck at basic political questions like "should there be efficient trains between London and Manchester?" At least Burnham knows what a Manchester is.

[dijit]

we’re on year 70 of those 30 years.

The issue is that its unsexy, not “profitable” and it requires land - not to mention that the timeframes needed will make “the next government” look better.

Our governments are recklessly short sighted, and to be fair, even if they were not, their progress would be undone by the disaffected electorate who can be easily convinced that the sitting government is spaffing money up the wall.

[cryptopian]

I find that when selling people on the idea of network upgrades, people find the solutions unintuitive because issues in one place are often caused by bottlenecks very far away. Half the North West and services as far as Scotland, Wales and East Anglia are stuffed because of a single mile of rail in central Manchester, so you have tell people in rural Derbyshire, "hey, Manchester needs more rail funding, it'll help you, promise". It will, but you have to know a bit about the whole network to understand why.

[brabel]

If the system is just at capacity, but not beyond, it’s in fact well optimized. Empty trains are a loss to the company running it. Similar to airliners: they want every flight as full as possible. No company cares if it’s comfortable for the passengers since they either have no competition, or if they do it’s always the one offering the lowest price who wins. The passengers who want comfort can buy first class for a gigantic premium, and that is also well optimized: expensive enough to be profitable, cheap enough to actually sell tickets.

[physicsguy]

There is no "company" in effect and hasn't been since 2020. The government is the operator and tells companies where they can run trains and what they charge while the companies have levied a % of revenue. That's changing as the government is now bringing operation back in house as 'Great British Rail'.

[Aeolun]

> should there be efficient trains between London and Manchester?

And preferably at prices lower than what an equivalent journey would cost by airplane.

[pydry]

I talked to an NHS consultant and they said similar things about waste in the NHS - there is still waste, but by and large it's been honed into a very lean and efficient (albeit budget starved) machine.

This excludes corruption based inefficiencies like the PPE scandal.

[21asdffdsa12]

Actually- there is.. if you give up on the idea of "stopping at the station".. you just pick up a car that raced ahead and up to speed- and drop a car that gets left behind and pulls into the station.. okay maybe not with the UK-Rail..

Basically the train never stops- it just reorganizes.

[cryptopian]

Let's say you managed this. Say you designed trains and safety protocols for coupling/decoupling at 100mph, completely reconfigure the signalling system, solve the inevitable accessibility issues for embarking the fast train... You still have 100 tonne vehicles that need conflict management between different finite sets of steel rails. And all of those other things would need physical reconfiguration as well.

[bcjdjsndon]

....wot

[pjc50]

Despite how mad this sounds, a smaller variant was actually tried at the peak of French techno-optimism: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aramis_(personal_rapid_transit...

(obviously this is something that, even if you could get it to work for large 100mph trains, is going to be horrifically vulnerable to the first accident)