New KiwiRail tracks too narrow for trains
New KiwiRail tracks too narrow for trains
Brand-new train tracks signed off by KiwiRail just two months ago are already in need of a fix after it was discovered they had been built too...
The second part of the article is about heat restrictions. I watched a video a few weeks ago about why train tracks don’t need expansion joints anymore and mitigating heat issues. Sounds like the people in charge in New Zealand need to learn about these advances.
I have no idea why this country sucks at infrastructure so much. Road are a mess, trains are a mess, ferries are a mess.
After WWII, to cater to a massively growing population, we as a nation (aka the government) spent between 10 - 15% of GDP on infrastructure (data from the Kaka podcast by Bernard Hickey); now we are spending somewhere between 5 - 10% of GDP on infrastructure.
So we used to spend roughly DOUBLE on infrastructure than we do today. We don't necessarily suck at infrastructure, we just don't invest like we used to.
Despite what National is trying to get you to believe, NZ is in a fairly good position WRT debt to GDP ratio. We could totally invest an extra 100 billion over 10 years to improve our infrastructure; it would basically double our ratio (current $83B to $395B or 21% in 2023 See: Stats NZ) this is "net debit" not sure what the difference is between net and total debit but I didn't see a source for total debit (if there is a difference). Assuming the economy keeps growing at the 1.3% in this link the debit ratio would look something like $200B to $450B or 44%.
According to this we are already at 50.99%; I'm not sure how this relates to "net debit" on the stats NZ page.
The numbers are a bit vague, depending on source, the picture is pretty good, NZ is doing well internationally WRT debit to GDP ratio; we can afford major investment in infrastructure.....unfortunately we would rather send billions overseas in interest payments to foreign banks by squeezing the housing supply thus jacking up the prices indefinitely.
I would caution that there's a fair gap between "don't need expansion joints" and "don't have heat restrictions". A few days a year of heat restrictions could be considered a reasonable engineering trade-off, if it manages costs
I’m not an expert by any means, but the engineer who makes the videos spent a good bit of time talking about the importance of building for the hottest days and how they do that. I don’t remember now if he talked about heat restrictions on speed, but the point was definitely about minimizing deformations to the track.