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• Feòrag commented on Sunbathing in Edinburgh
  I know mostly about Japanese trains, and there, going into the cities, the shinkansen might appear to be sharing track, but they don't (they can't - they run on a different gauge to other Japanese trains!). They have reserved platforms and reserved track even going into major stations. A shinkansen will not be sat waiting outside a main station waiting for a free platform or route into the station. Presumably, if what you say is true, the French TGVs suffer horrendous delays doing the French equivalent of being stuck just outside York station. But, as your monorail assertion is purest...
• Charlie Stross commented on Sunbathing in Edinburgh
  It's been climate change all along except to the simple-minded. Hadn't you noticed?...
• bellinghman commented on Sunbathing in Edinburgh
  As far as my experience goes, the TGVs running into Switzerland are (once out of France) running on the same track as normal trains. I have on occasion boarded 'the next train at platform 4' at Basel station to go to Zurich, and been mildly surprised to have a TGV stop rather than a Pendolino. What TGVs don't do is to travel very fast on those tracks. The quickest trains between Basel and Zurich are not (last time I checked) the TGVs, because the Pendolinos make much better speed on those lines. TGVs are built for straight line speed, and...
• Charlie Stross commented on Sunbathing in Edinburgh
  Greg, the Edinburgh trams fell victim to three problems: a) A fixed-price contract in Sterling awarded to a German contractor (paying their overheads in Euros). Graph Sterling against the Euro over the past decade and the problem will leap out at you: bluntly, the contractor is being horribly squeezed by the strength of their home currency. The agreement was signed in mid-2006. Back then, a dollar bought you €0.80; today it buys €0.67. Assuming Sterling shadows the dollar (cough, splutter: alas, I don't have a sterling/euro exchange rate history to refer to), I make that around a 16% drop in...
• Charlie Stross commented on Sunbathing in Edinburgh
  One issue that was bound to cause Edinburgh headaches was that there are something like 22 UNESCO World Heritage Sites in the city, and more than 10% of it is Grade One or Grade Two listed. And the Old Town and New Town are dense. In and of itself, that puts huge constraints on where and how you can run transit routes through the city centre -- and if you don't run them into the city centre, what's the point of having them? (The city centre is the UK's #2 tourist destination after central London, and has both the main...