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“The Stad Ship Tunnel will be the world’s first ship tunnel.” are they joking? There are plenty examples of ship tunnels, both historic and still working…
@Barend Köbben: I know there are plenty of historic ones in the UK but those tend to be much smaller. Is this perhaps the first one large enough for seafaring vessels or the first one directly connected to the sea?
Re. the Freewheeling article… adept “management” of politicians, including Boris, was always one of Peter Hendy’s main core strengths (he could almost have played a rather less smooth Sir Humphery in “Yes, Minister”). Let’s hope he manages to land this review (What,,, Anooother One??) in the right place…
But hopefully not an excuse to kick publication of the Williams review even further into the long grass? Interested to see what this says – Keith Williams and Peter Hendy are old mates from the TfL Board and Williams is no fool either, so hopefully it manages to deliver some sensible recommendations in a politically acceptable way….
The names of those American long-distance trains are so romantic and evocative. I’m itching to go travelling again and see more of the world from a train.
Re ship tunnels, the Rove tunnel near Marseilles was nearly as wide, but nothing like as tall as this proposal. It could still accomodate seafaring vessels that could reasonably be described as ships.
Personally, I can’t help thinking of the Corinth Canal, but I suppose it technically is cutting with over bridges.
Re ship tunnels, perhaps Barend Köbben would like to share with us where the plenty of examples referred to are?
There are plenty of tunnels for canal boats (like the closed Rove), and ship-capable canals (like Corinth, which has a cutting but no tunnel), but none of these that I can think of fit the ship-tunnel bill.
Did the French Atlantic-Med canal have a tunnel for sea capable ‘ships’ of it’s era?
The Norwegians reckon they can excavate and fit out this 1700m tunnel 36m wide and 49m high at an estimated cost of about NOK 3bn or around £260m. Norway has among the highest labour costs in the world.
We could do with learning how to achieve engineering projects at costs like that.
@ Ivan
It’s through solid stable rock, and will require no complicated infrastructure or ventilation or any of the other complexities of rail or road engineering. Essentially they just need a big pile of dynamite, some drills and a few diggers and trucks. Norway builds lots of tunnels so they have plenty of expertise too
A few more details on the approval of Norway’s ship tunnel.
@Herned
Sometimes what you say it might even be true. But every time I complain such of cost differences, out comes this same reason. It can’t always be true that things are easy on the continent and difficult here. It is another myth of British exceptionalism.
We have schadenfreude when some continental infrastructure project goes horribly over-budget, like the new Berlin Airport. But the sad fact is, even such horribly over-budget projects can be cheaper than the undisturbed cost of doing the same thing here. The new Olkiluoto 1600MW nuclear reactor in Finland, supposed to open in 2010, now projected for 2022, in the end has a delivered cost estimate of €8.5bn. That’s still cheaper per item than Hinkley Point C (2 x 1600MW), which hasn’t gone (badly) wrong yet, and is to the same general design. And it ought to have savings from building two of the same item on the same site.
Building railways here seems to cost in general three times what it costs on the continent, even after deducting land costs. The only European countries whose road-building is more costly than Britain are Norway, Switzerland and Austria, and that’s because those countries are so very mountainous.
If we can’t get close to continental costs for infrastructure building, we can’t afford anywhere near as much infrastructure as them. And that is a big drag on our economic development. It’s a big issue to carry on sweeping under the mythological carpet of British exceptionalism. When I look at that ship tunnel, the idea we could build something like that in this country at such a cost, be it through the solid rock common on the western margins of this land, still seems fantastic.
Ivan
Time for an investigative article, then: “Why are British Engineering Projects so expensive?”
Slight problem, you can’t really put it down as a “London” thing, unless you want to limit it to, say, CR1 + CR2 vs Paris RER/Grand Paris Express comparisons (?)
Greg, for such a comparison you might want to do a search for such a topic.
The closest I have found is The Transit Capital Construction Database by the Eno Center for Transportation, but it is mainly US costs.
I’ve just come across this site which is evaluating public transport rail project costs from around the world. Many cities are listed, and some costs derived. Whilst the goal of the site is to provide explanations and rationales for cost differences, it doesn’t seem to have gotten to that point yet in a few cities I looked at. Nonetheless, this is an ambitious project with much work ahead of it that is well worth watching.
@LONG BRANCH MIKE
I was walking up the Parkland Walk from Finsbury Park to Highgate yesterday and it did occur to me that perhaps one of the differences between countries in pricing up rail development projects was to do with different jurisdictions attitudes to Capex and Opex.
There has always been an British reluctance to rely on ongoing maintenance of a building project. The thing gets built and then, no ongoing spending is expended. The whole project must consist of only Capex with an Opex of zero.
The Netherlands, by comparison, is a country built in a more precarious situation. You can’t build something and not expect it slowly sink into the ground! It seems, from casual observation, that building projects must factor in a lot of Opex to keep whatever it built in good condition. If you travel from Holland to Belgium you can clearly see the transition as Belgium has a much more “British” infrastructure building cycle.
Another consideration is the question about land assets. If a government body acquires some land from a private body, is this Capex spending, or is this just the transfer of an asset whilst retaining the value. If the state pays “£10m” for a plot of land, this technically a transfer of cash for an fixed asset, which could be technically be resold for the same value, this isn’t spending in many forms of accounting, but I would guess that some places count this as spending simply because they are using government debt to pay the private entity.