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It could be done. The CFF/SBB upgraded the Simplon line to take double-decker trains to increase capacity. It was a massive job, including increasing the height of the 489m long tunnel at St Maurice, increasing the height of the Simplon tunnel by lowering the rail bed, and raising various bridges, including the one at Vevey. Took 10 years or so, but the disruption was minimal, and the works on the St Maurice tunnel came in 11% under budget and ahead of schedule. I do sometimes wonder whether, if the government is going to out-source the running of the UK's rail network, they wouldn't be better off just sub-contracting the entire thing to the SBB/CFF and letting them get on with it.
One of the articles I read said that £26Bn of the cost of HS2 was due to the lack of major UK rail infra projects - we'd lost the people who knew how to do things, and had to hire them and/or train them, that state capacity had simply disappeared as people retired and were not replaced.
Continental countries have, in the main, a huge institutional knowledge base to work with embodied in the people who work on these projects.
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Dammit
It could be done. The CFF/SBB upgraded the Simplon line to take double-decker trains to increase capacity. It was a massive job, including increasing the height of the 489m long tunnel at St Maurice, increasing the height of the Simplon tunnel by lowering the rail bed, and raising various bridges, including the one at Vevey. Took 10 years or so, but the disruption was minimal, and the works on the St Maurice tunnel came in 11% under budget and ahead of schedule. I do sometimes wonder whether, if the government is going to out-source the running of the UK's rail network, they wouldn't be better off just sub-contracting the entire thing to the SBB/CFF and letting them get on with it.