> You could easily have useful stretches of rail working around the north of England by now, proving out the technology and adding and upgrading stations much later.
Upgrading stations in-place is extremely expensive, far more so than building them in the first place. (In theory opening the railway without the station and then closing it for months to add the station might be better all round, but in practice passengers throw a fit if you try to do that).
> for example with crossrail you could have aimed to open Liverpool Street to Whitechapel, then add in Tottenham Court Road, etc. etc.
So you'd have to build a bunch of extra turnback facilities, resignal everything repeatedly, use those expensive TBMs for longer, and to what benefit?
They did build one station early to prove things out and understand any problems (Canary Wharf). Not a lot of value in doing more than that.
> As much as I love the Elizabeth line I’m pretty sure it is crazy over specified, the stations and tunnels are all gargantuan and they probably could have made everything 20% smaller IMO which would have saved them quite bit.
No it wouldn't, that's exactly the sort of backwards shortsighted thinking that messed up HS2 (if we make the charitable assumption that Sunak wasn't just deliberately wrecking it). The most expensive part of building the Elizabeth line was demolishing and digging up a bunch of buildings in central London. Rebuilding an existing underground railway in London to be bigger is literally impossible to do economically, the size they built it was the size it will be forever, and even if building it to tube size had been a good idea (it isn't) it would have been illegal under accessibility regulations. Making the stations 20% smaller would have been penny-wise and pound-foolish in the extreme.
> I often think the politicians egos are the biggest pitfall for most infrastructure projects.
Well, yes, but the way that manifests is politicians thinking they can tell the people building it to just do x y and z and that will save money, rather than accepting that actually the experts know what they're doing. The same thinking as your comment, in other words.
Upgrading stations in-place is extremely expensive, far more so than building them in the first place. (In theory opening the railway without the station and then closing it for months to add the station might be better all round, but in practice passengers throw a fit if you try to do that).
> for example with crossrail you could have aimed to open Liverpool Street to Whitechapel, then add in Tottenham Court Road, etc. etc.
So you'd have to build a bunch of extra turnback facilities, resignal everything repeatedly, use those expensive TBMs for longer, and to what benefit?
They did build one station early to prove things out and understand any problems (Canary Wharf). Not a lot of value in doing more than that.
> As much as I love the Elizabeth line I’m pretty sure it is crazy over specified, the stations and tunnels are all gargantuan and they probably could have made everything 20% smaller IMO which would have saved them quite bit.
No it wouldn't, that's exactly the sort of backwards shortsighted thinking that messed up HS2 (if we make the charitable assumption that Sunak wasn't just deliberately wrecking it). The most expensive part of building the Elizabeth line was demolishing and digging up a bunch of buildings in central London. Rebuilding an existing underground railway in London to be bigger is literally impossible to do economically, the size they built it was the size it will be forever, and even if building it to tube size had been a good idea (it isn't) it would have been illegal under accessibility regulations. Making the stations 20% smaller would have been penny-wise and pound-foolish in the extreme.
> I often think the politicians egos are the biggest pitfall for most infrastructure projects.
Well, yes, but the way that manifests is politicians thinking they can tell the people building it to just do x y and z and that will save money, rather than accepting that actually the experts know what they're doing. The same thinking as your comment, in other words.