Friday, August 28, 2009

London to Glasgow in Two Hours

A report in The Guardian Wednesday 26 August 2009 discusses the possibility and cost of halving the current 4h10m trip to 2h16m.

Presumably it's not so long ago that 4h10m represented a halving from 8h20m, or a full working-day spent eating stale ham sandwiches and drinking luke-warm milky tea.

Made me think.

First up, I'd be happy to take half the £34bn cost and stick it in my Royal Bank account.

Then I'd start planning for the future.

This article allows that the basic information has not been updated since June 1999, and offers about 6 hours for the trip.

With these figures in mind, I ran off a little spreadsheet that suggests eight years ago the trip was double what it is now, say 8h20m.

Back in 1999 my modem was 56kbs, so in the time it would take me to travel by train London to Glasgow, I could have downloaded about 210 megabytes, although the BBS operator would have been a tad upset.

This year, 2009, I have a DSL modem. A test at 1pm today drew almost 6mbs. Probably because all the teenage boys are at the 'Ex.

If I've done my sums right, today in the 2h16m trip I could d/l just over 6 Gigabytes, and frankly BELL doesn't seem to give a damn.

Looking ahead, and making a crass assumption that speeds double in the next 10 years and then settle down to a stable rate, my downloads would peak in 2019, and then begin to decline, as the rail service dropped to a 128 second trip in 2039.

It's tough to compete with teleporting a human body London to Glasgow in just over two minutes. ZIP files just won't cut it anymore.

But as usual it prompts the question: Who are these people, and why do they need to get to Glasgow in 2 hours instead of 4, and would they be happier could they do it in one hour (which can be done by air), or 30 minutes?

Teleconferencing is widespread today. Most of us have a story or two about a contract we have fulfilled without ever meeting the client/contractor.

Vancouver to Prince Rupert was about 90 minutes last time I looked. Rail distance seems to be three times the distance between Glasgow and London. (No wonder Canada seems big to our visitors from the UK! Prince Rupert is only half way to Dease Lake!)

£34bn seems like an awful lot of money to recoup in rail fares.

By the way, the rail trip between Terrace and Prince Rupert has to be one of the most beautiful and peaceful in the world. Go at the end of May.

PostScript

A report in today's Toronto Star includes the following politically useful note:

• More prosaically, the delay occurred because the House of Commons was on summer break and King had promised to let parliament make the ultimate decision. By Aug. 31, when it was clear what was coming, MPs were recalled, but in those train-travel days, the process would take a week.

• The seven-day delay allowed King, an ever-shrewd politician "with an acute sense of political reality," says Granatstein, to nail down final details.

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