It's the section of the A14 between the A1 (not M1) and Cambridge that is (after many years of foot dragging and 'announcements') being upgraded. That part is shared between the M11-A1 north-south route and the A14 east-west route. These are both nationally important routes - the eastern end of the A14 is at Felixstowe (busiest container port in the country) and the M11-A1 carries a fair amount of cross-channel freight that's heading further north. Just stand on one of overbridges on that section and watch the trucks go by (slowly, due to congestion)...
I travelled over that road twice last week. It was certainly very busy indeed, with huge numbers of HGVs, but traffic was moving quite quickly in both directions (and would have done even better but the number of HGVs trying to overtake one another with a minimal speed-differential) except for the 5 or 6 miles west of Cambridge where the widening works are just beginning, where we came to a brief standstill several times. There is absolutely no doubt that the rebuilding of the road between the M1 and Cambridge is fully justified. My point was simply that this £1.5bn project that has barely begun goes ahead without even being de-specked, whereas equally necessary improvements to railways in more northern areas of the country get cut back or cancelled and much as I'm a supporter of the MML, it's more the appallingly overcrowded and low-quality route between Manchester and Leeds that I'm thinking of.
If we look back, the general south-eastern area has had HS1, Reading station, Crossrail, Thameslink, and Gordon Brown Cardiff-Labour-pleasing GW electrification in recent years, and now looks set to get Crossrail 2. The north-west has had some electrification infill (useful, but small-scale) and the Ordsall Chord scheme that may well run out of capacity in a very few years. What has the north-east had? The imbalance in transport investment of all sorts, not just rail, is enormous. Yet unless we accept that London is to continue to move away from the rest of the country economically investment in the so-called provinces really is needed. Will the City Regions help? It will be interesting to see.
Yes, more of that freight should go by train, but both of the routes west of Ipswich to the Midlands and the North are capacity constrained, and since people seem to want more passenger trains on the same routes that situation isn't likely to get much better for some time. One of the main reasons for building the southern part of HS2 is to free up capacity on the classic route to the Midlands for other traffic, including freight.
The capacity for freight was always there on the four-track main lines. What seems to have happened is that the inexorable growth and spread of London commuter traffic seems to have swallowed up the slow-line capacity, be trying its best to swallow up fast-line capacity too, and to be the main justification for the insistence on building the southern part of HS2 first. Other things being equal, I would be an HS2 enthusiast (in a slightly different form), having seen what high-speed lines in other European countries have done, but they are not equal, and if investment is limited, then I think the needs of the area bounded by Birmingham, Liverpool, Manchester, Leeds, Sheffield, and back to Birmingham are probably now greatest.
Geography and present-day trading and shipping patterns mean that inevitably a major part of our international trade flows though southern England - it needs the infrastructure to handle it, otherwise the whole country suffers.
No problem with that but not at the expense of the rest of the country. A properly balanced policy is needed.
Personally I've never really understood why at least one of the northern trans-Pennine rail routes wasn't electrified years ago.
I agree completely. I put it down in part to the British Railways Regions which always seemed to be interested only in the main lines to and from London (with perhaps just a trifle of interest in the NE/SW line) and which seemed to leave Lancashire and Yorkshire lines languishing in very much the state they had been before WW2.
And as for 'discontinuous' electrification of a route with a very high frequency train service - I despair, it makes me feel embarrassed as an engineer that it's even being considered. It's not 'smart' it's just weasel-word penny-pinching.
Absolutely! Unfortunately, how British!
The reasons for project failures are well known - there have books on the subject for decades now. But they usually boil down to one thing, to produce accurate bottom-up costs, you really need to have carried out a design that is detailed down to a level where estimates of materials and labour of each component can be carried out, but is also complete (missing components always add to cost). Then as you say you have to ban (or attempt to manage) changes while the design is implemented and to avoid trends towards gold-plated solutions. These things are very much joint project management/technical responsibilities, I was lumping the two together as "engineering solutions".