Comment by ClumsyPilot

> If you want to build a train the best way to save money is to build exactly the same as everyone else does: standard off the shelf trains, running on standard off the shelf rails, and standard off the shelf overhead rail.

You are speaking like a naive person that thinks that most the challenge is the physical world

But in UK most of the challenge is archaic and idiosyncratic laws, disproportionately powerful NIMBY’s and the treasury brain.

The treasury brain will approve a project with 1X capex and 10x opex instead of one that has 2X capex and 1X opex

The NYMBY is wild and unpredictable, they just killed project for a data centre placed on top of a literal dump because it would ruin the view of that dump from a motorway (nobody lives there)

A project to re-open 3 miles of railway that already exists took 5 years to approve and 80,000 pages of environmental accessment

But if it’s innovate and designed in UK it might just slip through