Derailed

One of the worst "live" examples of botched British public-sector procurement is currently underway in Edinburgh (one of my favourite cities in the whole world), with an otherwise worthwhile project to bring trams back to the city.

The original concept was to have a tea-cup shaped network, to be built in phases, that would connect most of the key transport corridors, relieving Edinburgh's heavily-congested roads and vastly increasing capacity on the already fairly dense bus network.

But huge cost over-runs have led to the ambitions for the scheme being cut back, and Phase 1 became the main goal:

In the latest fiasco, Phase 1 has itself been cut back even further, the eastern arm being chopped off. At one point last week the City Council voted to cut it even more, terminating at Haymarket on the western edge of the city centre rather than going on to the main rail hub at Waverley and then the main bus hub at St Andrew Square:

In a rare moment of sanity that decision has now been reversed, with the government threatening to withdraw funding if that cut back was not over-turned.

The irony here is, of course, that Edinburgh, in common with pretty much every British city and decent-sized town, once had an incredibly dense network of tramways:

Including one which pretty much followed the original Phase 1 route (although obviously not extending out to the airport in the far west, off that plan).

In these rather super computer-generated images, the tram/heavy rail interchange at Gogarburn (on the city's western outskirts, towards the airport) is shown in loving (if slightly eccentric) detail.

These images, if nothing else, show the sheer scale and ambition of the proposed tram system.

Alas, it has got bogged down in extraordinary failures like the saga of the cracking of the newly-laid tracks -- how on earth did that happen?:

The project, originally slated for opening in 2011/12, has now been shoved further and further back -- at the moment no-one thinks any passengers will be carried before 2014 -- and the closest the citizens have got is a stationery tram exhibit sitting on the cobbles:

Work on this £1bn project (double the original estimate) continues at a snail's pace, with the contractors and the Council blaming each other, the threat of litigation hanging heavy in the air.

The trams themselves -- built years ago by CAF in anticipation of the original opening date -- are all now sitting in storage, and the latest idea is that they'll be sent to Croydon to operate on that borough's hugely successful and expanding tram network.