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Unfulfilled projects go back 70-plus years
THE comments in your editorial (RM Sept) about the plethora of unfulfilled projects over the last 20 years only reflects what seems to have been a constant issue over the last 70 years.
With the extra time afforded me by the current lock-down regulations, I have been looking through The RM since 1949, (the year of my birth) and I have currently reached 1959.
The pages are justfull of Government announcements of ambitious plans, the vast majority of which are never mentioned again. What is more, there is plentiful evidence, almost in every issue I have read so far, that budgeting for railway related projects right from the very beginning of the railways, was almost invariably hopelessly optimistic.
Perhaps it should be no surprise it is still the case infrastructure projects so often run late and over budget.
On a completely different tack, the caption for the photo on the bottom left of p22 of the current issue (September) states that 154. 1 mph remains a UK record for a passenger-carrying train. Do not 'Eurostars'on HS1 travel at 186mph?
Geoffrey Biggs Solihull
History is unfortunately littered with promises of ambitious projects which have never materialised or have been cancelled.
Both during Nationalisation and now Privatisation (what's left of it) have been the casualty of short-term thinking by Government ministers, unlike Switzerland, where there are local votes on major infrastructure projects, which are then delivered. As for the 154.1 mph speed record, the caption should have made clear this was on classic lines, not dedicated high-speed tracks - Ed
Class 33 question solved?