Episode 2 Built in Britain

Once in a while, something happens that marks a turning point.

For a time, Britain shied away from bold construction projects.

We patched and mended,

and lived off the achievements of our Victorian forefathers.

Then along came something rather special.

What was it?

Well, I'm standing right on top of it now.

St Pancras Station.

The jewel in the crown of Britain's first major new railway in 100 years...

..and this country's first high-speed line.

It proved that when we put our mind to it,

we can do large-scale infrastructure in the UK.

And now there are grounds for thinking

we're poised to re-discover our Victorian ambition.

In the last programme,

I looked at why Britain needs more infrastructure.

Now, a look at how we're better placed to build that infrastructure

than we have been for 100 years.

We'll see some of the great engineering that confirms it

and we'll see what obstacles need to be overcome.

Could we be heading for a new Victorian age for infrastructure in the UK?

PA SYSTEM: 'This is St Pancras International...'

It's ironic that St Pancras -

a grand central statement of Victorian achievement in building infrastructure -

also marked the start of a new era in 21st century construction

as the terminus of our first high speed line.

That line boasts the kind of engineering

we thought we somehow couldn't manage -

150 bridges, miles of tunnels,

and the longest high-speed viaduct in Europe,

and the only way to experience it properly, of course,

is to ride up in the front of the javelin train.

VARIOUS MACHINES BEEP

-Hello there.

-Hello.

-Is this the passenger seat, the co-pilot seat?

-You may sit there. Mind the little foot pedal below you.

-Mind the red button because it causes unnecessary panic if you press it!

-Nice!

Got your pre-flight checks.

All the checks have been done,

all the testing's been carried out, and she's good to go.

London, Kent, to Paris and beyond -

a line where trains reach speeds of 180mph -

as fast as a formula one car, but with a little more leg room.

Well, it took a while before we got it, but here it is -

Britain's first real high speed line.

What's great about being in the front of the train is,

you don't just get much more of a sensation of speed

than you do when you're looking out the window from the side,

you also just see how much has been built around this line -

the tunnels, the bridges, the overhead power lines, the whole lot.

Although only 100 kilometres long,

it was far more ambitious than most high speed lines elsewhere,

with a fifth of it buried under ground.

Bridges.

Stations.

Listed buildings relocated.

And the modernisation of St Pancras.

And the building of some dazzling structures.

This is when you can... put your foot down a bit, right?

Well, give it a bit more power, yes.

This is the Medway Viaduct - 1.25 kilometres of it.

At the time, the longest, single-span high speed rail bridge in the world.

It's where the trains on this line hit top speed.

Passengers have fantastic views out of the Medway Valley,

but only for a brief 15 seconds.

Journey complete.

I'm going to get off here,

at the end of the high speed section of the line,

to talk to one of the really important individuals

who was involved in building it.

And what better place to meet

than right under the Medway Viaduct itself?

Look at the spray just coming off it.

Raw power.

This particular bridge is actually at the heart of what the project is about,

which is sitting major infrastructure into the landscape.

And this dominated a lot of our thinking about...

how we should design bridges for this project

and there are 150 of them. Medway is just one.

And then, 11 miles away,

is probably the most challenging feature, the Thurrock Viaduct.

It had to be fitted around existing infrastructure.

And that one's complicated

because you're kind of weaving a bit there, aren't you?

Oh yes, nearly forgot the little complication of the Thurrock Bridge.

We coined the phrase "Threading the needle".

Why "Threading the needle"?

Because when the high speed line surfaces from its tunnels under the Thames,

it becomes airborne and has to weave between the two carriageways

linking the M25 to the QE2 Bridge and the Dartford Tunnel.

So they used a so-called push launch technique

and they built this 1.4 kilometre long bridge from one end

and pushed it into place, every fortnight for a year,

and they did it barely disrupting the M25.

It's very difficult to conceive of any other technique

that could have been used which literally pushed the bridge

over one carriageway and under the bridge of the other.

But what made High Speed 1 special was not the engineering,

but the fact the project was managed and delivered

relatively successfully.

You see, building bridges, tunnels and stations is difficult.

Each project is unique, inevitably involving a different assembly of owners, contractors and workers,

and the trick to doing it well

is to stop them squabbling with each other over money

and instead, getting them to work together.

Easy to say, hard to do.

The attitudes that we realised we would have to change

were the ones of collaboration, rather than confrontation,

so that everything was aligned as one project.

It was their project, our project. It wasn't someone else's project.

We all wanted it to be a success.

Which is more difficult? Is it building the thing

or is it organising the building of the thing?

Most certainly the most difficult task on a major project

is alignment - the alignment of people.

Whether they be the community that you're consulting with

or the workers that are constructing it,

or the designers that are trying to collaborate with each other,

it is aligning them to the single message, which is the delivery.

Alignment.

An engineering term that also applies to managing people.

Engineering the right mind-set in humans

is even tougher than designing bridges.

It takes well-designed contracts and incentives.

I think when I was young, I just always assumed

that we couldn't build stuff like this without it going wrong,

being late, much more expensive than anyone thought.

I'm exaggerating slightly when I say this, but before HS1,

large infrastructure projects were marked by large cost overruns,

late delivery, and lots of conflict between the parties involved.

After HS1, there is an attitude of collaboration,

a recognition that by aligning people together,

you achieve so much more and that really is the key to the success of HS1

and the many projects which have followed it,

and those which will come into the future.

PA: 'The train now standing at platform 11 terminates here.'

You may not have known that High Speed 1

marked such a watershed for infrastructure in the UK,

because when construction goes well, you don't really hear about it.

There's no reason to.

But just across the road from St Pancras

is an example of how difficult we used to make it for ourselves.

The great British Library cost three times what it was meant to.

There were endless arguments over changes to the design.

And it wasn't the only demonstration that we British

have lost the knack of large-scale construction.

Going back 15 years, there was the Jubilee Line extension in London.

It was late and expensive.

Back a few more years,

the Channel Tunnel cost almost twice what it was meant to

and was a year late.

It was marked by conflict between Eurotunnel and its builders.

They argued for ages

over who would pay for the costs of changes made to the work programme

during construction itself. I could go on.

In all these cases, the engineering itself is astounding.

People are impressed by these projects now.

It's just they typify the fact that in Britain,

construction has been expensive and unpredictable

as layers of contractors, sub-contractors and workers

fight over cost and reward.

Our adversarial approach to business doesn't seem to have worked,

and as if that wasn't enough,

we've had another small problem too. Politics.

Our political system is like our old construction business in being adversarial

and it has sometimes led

to very bad decisions being taken about what to build.

When it comes to decisions,

they don't come more spectacular than this.

This is the marvellous Humber Bridge.

Of nearly 2.5 kilometres,

it was once the longest single-span suspension bridge in the world.

Hull's answer to the Golden Gate.

But I'm here because it offers a most striking contrast -

an example of terrible human decision making.

And yet, such wonderful construction.

We'll talk about bad politics later. First though, the great engineering.

That is where I thought I was going,

but it turns out the interesting bit of this bridge is down below.

Right, whoa.

You just don't realise how much there is below.

Roger, what a remarkable place to meet.

-It's impressive, isn't it?

-It's serene here, isn't it?

-It is.

We're in the middle of a 200,000-ton block of concrete.

It gives you some idea of the scale.

You could film a really good James Bond sequence in here.

Whoa, look at those.

Fantastic, aren't they?

This is carrying the weight of the entire bridge?

Yes, we're standing at one end

of that main cable that goes across the river, which gives the bridge its distinctive shape.

You can think of it as being a washing line anchored at the end,

going over two clothes props which is the towers

and then the bridge itself is the washing hanging on the line.

This is where the clothes line is anchored to the ground.

These thick cables

are each made of a thin piece of wire

that travels 2.5 kilometres across the bridge and then back again,

400 times.

There are nearly 15,000 strands in all.

What about the road bridge itself? I mean, how stable is that?

This bridge tries to use the wind to its advantage.

The route of the wind over the top of the bridge

is shorter than the route underneath,

so it's like an upside-down aircraft wing.

So as the wind blows, the bridge tends to move downwards,

tight against the hanger ropes,

flying on the air currents, like washing on a line.

It's amazing to think how much underneath the bridge there is,

but this isn't the only bit, is it?

The road deck is a hollow steel box

and you can walk the whole mile-and-a-half through there

from one side of the river to the other inside the road deck.

That sounds like a challenge.

Have you ever walked through a bridge before?

I won't get the full distance,

but I can certainly get the measure of it down here

and in particular, just how busy it is.

ECHOING

I can hear the frequency of the traffic a few metres overhead, or lack thereof.

A very strange noise.

But for a four lane highway, it is actually just a tad quiet.

Oh, it's heavy.

Oh.

I'm free.

They kindly left that unbolted for me.

Now, I mentioned the lack of traffic.

It's not surprising, really,

because while it matches the Golden Gate Bridge is scale,

instead of linking San Francisco to its golden peninsula,

this links Barton to Hessle, just outside Hull.

You might ask why it was built.

Well, the process that got it under way was, let's say,

the kind of thing that gives politics a bad name.

# The year of 1966 Found Harold Wilson in a fix

# With his overall majority Down to two

# He just couldn't face rejection At the Hull North by-election

# Barbara Castle came to see what she could do... #

There had been debates about schemes

for bridging the Humber for over a century before,

but the huge costs and engineering difficulties saw them all off.

Boat remained the only option.

When the local Labour MP suddenly died,

Prime Minister Harold Wilson's majority was cut to two.

Wilson cynically sanctioned the building of the bridge

in the hope of swinging the by-election in his favour.

Minister of Transport, Barbara Castle, announced,

"Hull shall have its bridge" just before the by-election.

# You'll get your Humber Bridge And there won't be much delay... #

Joseph Kevin McNamara, 24,479.

Labour hung on to their tiny majority and Hull got its bridge.

'As for the new bridge,

'no-one disputes it's a triumph of British engineering.

'What remains to be seen is whether it will prove the critics right

'when they call it the Bridge from nowhere to nowhere.

It's worth saying, it wasn't just a bridge to nowhere,

it also epitomised many of the other problems

associated with infrastructure that I remember from my youth.

Far from collaboration, it was blighted by conflict.

In the era of the 1970's,

it reflected the state of Britain at the time,

with industrial relations problems.

The management were having to face industrial troubles

in the industrial climate of the 1970s

when there was the three-day week, there was wage restraint,

the unions were very much in control.

One classic case - there was a plague of ladybirds in 1976

and it was slippy,

so the welders and painters refused to come out of the cabin

because it was dangerous and they went on strike.

And then they would go on strike the following day

to get paid for the day that they were on strike.

Whether it's managing industrial relations or political decision making,

building bridges well is as much about people as concrete and cables.

We all know that the human factor plays a very big part in the projects.

Absolutely. And I think there are three items in a project -

there is the design and construction of it,

there is the money of it, and there is the human element.

And if you have a little triangle, you have a pound sign at one corner,

an integral sign for design and construction

and a Lowry matchstick man in the other corner.

-The human factor?

-Yes.

It always comes down to human beings.

A good bridge needs every element to be right, not just one.

The Humber didn't score on all of them.

It opened in 1981

and was supposed to pay for itself through tolls, but it never did.

Sadly, the Humber is an example of just one way in which our democracy

sometimes fails to deliver the infrastructure we need.

The combination of poor political decision making and expensive construction

means that we've sometimes built the wrong things

and they've cost too much.

To be honest, given our record,

it's not altogether surprising that for many years in this country,

we've been phobic about investing in infrastructure.

That partly explains why we have such crowded trains

and just one high speed rail line

and that's why High Speed 1 was so important as a turning point.

It's a sign the knack is coming back.

No-one could say we're getting it all right.

There are still some disasters lurking out there,

but something has changed.

High Speed 1 was just one sign we've found a bit of our inner Victorian,

and with the economy in the doldrums right now,

what better time is there

to give ourselves a Victorian style makeover?

Certainly the Victorian era

was one of huge industrial and technological change.

Our society was transformed by engineering, ingenuity and entrepreneurial prowess.

The role of national government was not to pay the bills back then,

but to let local government and private investors get on with it.

And the private sector did fund a lot,

paying the up-front costs

and then billing consumers if all went to plan.

It was their risk and it's how London got its Underground.

So Christian, just tell us where we are.

What is the significance of this carriage in which we're sitting?

Well, we are in the first carriages on the City and South London railway

which opened in 1890.

And it was London's first deep tube cut out of the clay

and the promoters thought,

"Well, actually, there's nothing to see, so why bother having windows?"

This is key infrastructure.

These days, we tend to think government has a very big role in those kind of things.

What was the general approach towards infrastructure in those days?

The amazing thing is that the London Underground

was financed by private people, and not necessarily rich people.

Somebody would say, "We want to build this line, come and invest in it,"

and they would hope to make money.

Some of them did and some of them didn't.

There was a sort of "can do" about it, which is admirable,

even though it was quite a messy process in the end.

It's probably more sensible to plan,

particularly today when you've got so much existing infrastructure already.

But in the kind of heyday of Victorian gung-ho capitalism,

I think it was the right thing for people just to come up with ideas,

because they probably came out with more original ideas

and came up with schemes that the government would never necessarily have thought of

and it did go through a sort of process by parliament -

it was slightly corrupt, you could buy off your MPs to make sure it got through -

but essentially they created a system of infrastructure

on the basis of taking risks

that, you know, we are eternally grateful for.

Without them, you know, we might not have had the Underground.

Private finance and risk taking, with a little help from the politicians.

well it got some results.

So here's a question.

Could we have a surge in investment in infrastructure on a Victorian scale now?

Not perhaps in the Victorian style, it was quite messy.

But even without a full on buccaneering speculator-led boom like the Victorians,

could we at least deliver the modern equivalent?

The answer is half a yes.

One reason for optimism is that today's private sector

does get on with the job of rebuilding Britain

without getting much attention, when the conditions are right.

Near this park is an example of the sort of thing I mean.

You probably haven't heard of it. You could pass by it every day without realising it,

but you'd soon know if it wasn't there.

To see it, you have to enter via a highly secure and cleverly disguised building.

The door is a portal into a whole world below London.

You may wonder why I'm cycling down here,

where the scenery gets quite samey.

It's the easiest way to get around of course.

This is a 20-kilometre long tunnel.

It's part of a network housing high voltage cables for the capital's electricity.

The network has some of the deepest tunnels in London

and this investment from National Grid

boasts an example of one of the simplest and clearest funding models you can imagine.

It's paid for by the private sector,

ultimately, though, paid for by electricity consumers.

all subject to independent regulation.

It's less spontaneous than the Victorian investment...

more structured...

So, Sara, I can see tunnels going off in all directions.

Where are we?

We are underneath London, somewhere between Elstree and St John's Wood

in National Grid's network of tunnels.

In an urban area, really, because it's so densely populated,

we have to put the cables under ground

and that can cause a lot of disruption

if they're shallow and under ground and you have to dig up roads,

so for the "London Tunnels" project, we've gone deep under ground.

It's a huge project -

£1 billion building 32 kilometres of tunnel underneath London.

Some of it up to 60 metres in depth

and that's really to bring power to Londoners.

London takes about 20% of our demand and that's increasing.

Where does National Grid get a billion quid from?

We put an investment plan together

and we go to OfGem, the regulator.

We agree that plan and they agree what revenues, what we're going to earn

and like many other businesses,

we go out to the market and raise money,

but because we have such certainty over what we're investing

and what we're earning, because we're regulated,

we can raise that money with confidence.

While this tunnel does have little in common with those dug by Victorian speculators,

it's interesting to note some similarities.

It's privately financed, politics stays out of the way,

and above all, the investment actually happens.

It's not a perfect system,

but there's a lot of utility work to be done in water and energy

and it is being done under this kind of arrangement.

So, why did I say that's only half a boom?

Why can't that give us a whole one?

If we know how to build these days,

can't the private sector get on with it?

Well the problem is,

there's a lot of infrastructure investment waiting in the wings

that can't be fixed between private utilities,

their independent regulators and their customers.

The best example of infrastructure poised to be unleashed -

but only poised - is nuclear power.

The decision's been taken that we need it, but while willing the end,

Government has yet to will the means.

This is Hinkley Point B in Somerset -

home to two ageing nuclear reactors.

Look inside to see the tasks required to build a replacement.

Nuclear power stations

are the most expensive and complex bits of infrastructure there is

and it's not just the engineering.

Getting them off the ground is complex, too,

because most of the cost is incurred before you sell any electricity.

It's all up front.

I've never been in a nuclear power plant before

and I'm now heading into the most secure and critical part of the whole operation.

Wow, big, big, big.

This hall sits above the nuclear reactors

and this crane is used to put fuel into those reactors and remove spent fuel.

This is what we call the charge machine.

This is basically the machine

-that refuels the reactor.

-Why does it need to be so tall?

Obviously it needs to be at least the depth of the reactor,

so it needs to be capable of taking of the longest item in the reactor out.

-So it is as high as the reactor is down?

-That's correct, yeah.

The scale, as you can see, is huge.

Fantastic bit of British engineering, that.

At the other side of this enormous crane

is one of the nuclear reactors.

So here it is. We're right on top of the reactor here at Hinkley Point.

We really can just walk on the reactor?

-You can see, obviously, all the 300 fuel channels.

-These little squares?

-That's right.

-Are these warm?

-You can have a touch if you want.

-You can touch them?

It's not cold. It's not cold.

It's remarkable that you can stand on the very top

of a nuclear reactor,

so placid up here above a furnace below,

where the temperature reaches nearly 600 degrees.

The radiation from the reactor itself

is shielded by thick, concrete walls.

'Five, four, three, two, one...

'Please walk through.'

Well, I've been checked. I'm not contaminated,

which is a relief to me and the company that run the place

and it's a relief to them because they hope

nuclear is going to be playing a very big part

in Britain's energy future.

The government has earmarked nine sites for new nuclear power stations.

Whatever you think about nuclear,

build those and you'd have a huge investment boom,

but politics is involved.

Up on these hills, you can see Britain's most likely

new nuclear power station - Hinkley Point C.

It's still mostly a field.

There's some activity.

The site is being cleared while the wait for a decision goes on.

But should it get the all-clear,

the scale of the operation will be enormous.

It's been likened to putting the Olympics on in Somerset.

Two new reactors, more than ten billion pounds,

taking years to complete, but it's the kind of investment

that even the brashest Victorian entrepreneur

would have struggled with.

How difficult is it to persuade investors to lend you the money

to build a whopping great nuclear power station there?

Investors worry about nuclear power projects

because you've got something that's very expensive up front.

It takes a long time to build

so you're paying out money while it's being built

and then you're looking forward

up to 60 years, 70 years in the future

to think about whether you're going to get the money back on that investment.

HM ELIZABETH II: It is with pride

that I now open Britain's first atomic power station.

Back in the '50s, we found a simple solution to that problem.

We got a nationalised company to do it,

so the early pioneering days of nuclear were backed by the taxpayer.

Indeed, Britain was leading the way. Science was sexy.

-All VIPs?

-No, boffins.

And scientists were like pop stars.

As it happens, we did it well, but uniquely expensively.

We never managed to get the costs down.

And the costs back then partly explain

why that nationalised option is not on the table today.

Today, we've rejected the simple option of taxpayer finance,

but have yet to complete the task

of finding a private-sector alternative.

You see, private companies can't really make nuclear power viable

unless they get something from Government.

In effect, what they want

is a certain level of revenue to be guaranteed,

so Government has to make its mind up.

At the end of this year we're taking a final investment decision

on building this new nuclear power station.

We, and the government, and the regulators,

and the planning authorities have a lot to do.

But, in summary, its moving in the right direction.

What is your nightmare in terms of Hinkley Point C?

As a citizen of the UK, my nightmare is that we muddle around

and we don't build what we need to build to keep the lights on,

and you know, it just all takes too long.

In short, if Government want nuclear, IT has to make a decision.

It can't wait for a Victorian entrepreneur to roll up and deliver it.

This is an exact replica of the control room at Hinkley B.

It perhaps shows you just how complicated running a nuclear power station can be.

Infrastructure, though, can be extremely simple.

You can get the private sector to decide on it,

to finance it, to deliver it,

but when it comes to nuclear - and that's not the only example -

it can be anything but simple.

And in those cases, there's so much you can delegate to the private sector, if you want to,

but you can never delegate it all.

Oxford Economist Dieter Helm is one of Britain's leading experts on infrastructure.

He's given a lot of thought to politics, government, private companies,

on how we can get a lot more investment in infrastructure.

If we think that private firms are just going to produce our infrastructure,

well forget it. It's not going to happen, OK?

They're not interested in whether they're going to get returns

in 20/30 years' time.

They're interested in getting the job done, getting the money,

getting it in the bank and their earnings reflecting it.

So what we have to do with infrastructure is,

we have to separate deciding what infrastructure we're going to have

from the question of who's going to do the producing,

who's going to do the investing?

So, you decide whether, for example,

you want to have an extension to the London Underground, OK?

That's a governmental decision.

But it's no good trying to ask the government to actually build it.

It's got to go to private sector to produce the construction skills,

but the choice of what sort of Underground to build -

that's for Government, and we need to sort those roles out.

So Government is one key

to unlocking a new wave of infrastructure investment in the UK,

either finding the money for them or the guarantees

that allow the private sector to find the money for them.

The interesting news is that if the politics and finance can be sorted,

construction itself moves surprisingly fast.

To see just how fast,

follow me on a boat ride 12 miles off the Kent coast.

A coast that is changing very rapidly.

It has an almost other-worldly feel.

Power stations on stilts, boats on legs,

and enormous creature-like machines

rising up out of the sea.

Welcome to what will soon be the largest off-shore wind farm in the world.

I really don't think I've ever seen anything quite like this.

As power stations go, you have to say,

it has a certain beauty about it, doesn't it,

laid out in endless lines in a tidy grid.

But you know, it's very hard to get a sense of perspective out here.

If you look at the middle distance, it looks so slim, so elegant -

an occasional glint of the reflection of the sun,

But it's when you get right up close,

you see that it's not so much slim, as just extremely tall.

I've sort of lost my sense of scale somehow.

These are very big turbines.

The diameter of our blades is slightly bigger than the London Eye

and the tip is about 150 metres above the sea level, so they're large.

These turbines are expensive.

The government didn't pay for them directly,

but set up a mechanism to ensure we'll pay for them on our fuel bills.

You may like that or loathe it,

but the speed these turbines go up shows just how quickly

the infrastructure industry does things these days

when it has the incentive to do so.

How quickly can you get wind turbines up?

Once we're up and running,

they go in fairly quickly.

From start to finish, we can put a foundation in in two days

and we can erect a turbine -

which comes in seven components - in 24 hours.

-It's that quick?

-Yeah.

It's a pretty calm day today here, but we're rocking around quite a lot.

Is the weather an issue for you?

When the sea state gets too rough, the waves get too high, the wind's too forceful,

we can't work and unfortunately, being in a windy area -

that's why they put the wind farm here...

-I suppose so.

-..we suffer quite badly!

When phase one is complete,

there'll be 175 separate turbines - 175 London Eyes -

covering an area of 100 square kilometres.

It'll have about half the capacity of Hinkley B nuclear power station

and it's not alone in this part of the sea.

It's a very busy area.

We've got the Thanet off-shore wind farm,

Kentish flats off of Whitstable,

and then going round towards the Essex coast,

you've got Greater Gabbard, Gunfleet Sands,

and of course, the biggest under construction at the moment, which is London Array.

Wind farms will hardly solve all our energy needs,

but the speed at which the coastline of Britain has changed

shows what can happen if you want it to.

Some of us love all this engineering

and if you want more of it, you've reason to be optimistic,

because we're better placed to deliver it than we have been since Victorian times.

We're tantalisingly close to that infrastructure boom

and there's another reason to be optimistic,

because we've got one thing the Victorians didn't have - modern technology -

and that can help us use our infrastructure more effectively.

So quite apart from building more, we can make our assets sweat.

We may live in an era of sat-navs,

GPS, mobile telecoms, but I've come back 109 years.

This signal box in Shrewsbury was built back then

to control the trains coming in and out of the busy station behind me.

The surprising and perhaps alarming thing is perhaps that it still does.

These levers direct trains

and allow many of them to run down the same track without hitting each other.

We can be smarter than this now,

but they did do it pretty well back then,

just after Queen Victoria died.

So, what are the levers doing then?

The different colour levers tell you what's what.

The white levers are the levers that aren't in use any more.

The black levers work the points.

The blue levers are facing point locks.

-Right.

-The red levers, they're the signals.

Got you. Now how physically hard is it to pull these?

It all depends on how far from the signal box the equipment is...

-Right.

-..and how heavy they are.

This one wouldn't be too bad because it's only, what, 50 yards that way.

24, on the other hand, is over on the viaduct there -

a good half a mile away. That one takes some pulling.

-Does it?

-Mmm. If I press the plunger,

try and get that lever back in the frame.

-Ahh.

-That's it.

-Perfectly easy.

-It's a very satisfying click at the end.

-That's it.

-Can I do this one?

That one next, yes, number 70.

That one almost went on its own.

That one will be the hardest.

Number 71. Is this a hard one? That's a bit harder.

If you struggle, I can do it for you.

No, I should be able to do it.

But that's... That's not meant to be like that!

There's surely some mistake.

-Let's have a look. Let's have a look.

-That can't be right.

You have to sort of... This is what I do, I...

There you are.

I should have done that one with you.

So now what we're going to do...

I didn't realise they were... That's ridiculous.

The only problem is now, its showing wrong.

Replacing this old technology by investing in new

has the potential to give us extra capacity

on the old railway infrastructure.

When this signal box was built,

the population of the UK was about 38 million.

It's obviously gone up a little since then,

putting more pressure on our infrastructure.

One of the things we've seen is that we've got to get it to work harder,

which in train terms, means having the trains closer together.

So just as we've moved into an era of video games -

away from toy trains -

we've moved into an era of new signalling systems,

that are designed to accommodate that.

And guess what? We don't have to go far to find one.

Just up there.

Buried among the tracks

on this sleepy and historic Cambrian Line in Wales,

lurks the world's most advanced signalling system.

More advanced even than the one used on High Speed 1.

This is the only one in the UK,

a pilot line while they iron out the numerous complications.

The eventual plan is to apply it far more widely.

Called ERTMS, it replaces traditional railway signals

with wireless technology and on-board computers.

Trackside signals will be a thing of the past.

The headquarters of this test zone are here

at the picturesque station of Machynlleth in mid-Wales.

It's where the trains get their brains.

I've never been under a train before

and you won't be surprised to hear there's actually a lot under here -

bits like the wheels, they look really, really big.

But this -

this is part of the new signalling system,

retro-fitted on these trains.

This is like a giant smart card reader

and then on the tracks you have the smart cards

so this picks up the information as to where the train is.

Although this doesn't look very hi-tech, it's being heralded

as the biggest change to signalling since the 1920s.

Under the old system, all trains were treated the same.

It couldn't differentiate between trains that brake slowly

and those that brake faster.

So, they always have the same stopping distance between them,

based on the slowest.

This new system, with its beacons and smart cards,

knows the type of train,

its stopping distance, speed and location.

Wireless technology processes all this data,

allowing computers on board the trains themselves

to decide whether it's safe to close the gap

and run closer to the other trains on the line.

It potentially means more trains on the track at a time.

This can increase capacity on the railways by significant amounts,

allowing us to get more bang for our buck on the lines we have -

a useful supplement to building new lines.

Alas, it will only be rolled out very slowly

as our old signals come to the end of their lives.

It's not going to be introduced overnight.

But hey, there is a similarly smart idea for making better use of our infrastructure

that CAN be introduced overnight.

For the first time in my whole life, I'm on a completely empty motorway.

No other traffic, the hoi polloi have been diverted elsewhere.

The frustrating thing is, though, that an 11-mph speed limit applies.

I'm on the M62, just outside Leeds.

Here, they're upgrading the road to get more traffic through.

It uses a bit of technology

and a piece of road that's been staring us in the face

and yet which has barely been used for 50 years.

'Running the full length of all motorway,

'there is a hard shoulder added to the road at great cost

'for one purpose and one purpose only.

'It is not a glorified lay-by for tired drivers.

'It is not there for dogs and children to stretch their legs.

'It is not there for picnickers

'to spread themselves and have a family party.

'The hard shoulder is there for your safety and protection in an emergency

'and for no other reason whatever.'

The hard shoulder now has better things to do than sit idle.

That's just one part of a huge upgrade here on the M62.

They're turning it into what's called a managed motorway

and the preparation involves closing the motorway to install new gantries.

This is quite a revolutionary concept to a lot of people.

It's the biggest change in the last 50 years on a motorway.

A managed motorway can accommodate more traffic than an unmanaged one.

Wire loops in the road detect vehicle speeds and congestion.

The information collected

can then be used to work out the best speed for drivers to go.

Illuminated signs can direct them accordingly, hence the gantries.

Here we go.

He'll start to rotate it

and then he'll swing it over and actually put it on the pedestal.

You can see the guide bolt at the other end.

Once the guide is in, they'll start to get the bolts in, ratchet them on,

and this is what we've got, super cantilever gantry - just under 18 metres.

But we've got gantries all over the country?

Yeah, but this is a special gantry.

Every 400 metres, there will be

loops in the road that detect the speed and the flow of traffic

and that automatically sets signs and signals,

but the key thing, as well, is at the same time,

we're opening up the hard shoulder and easing congestion and making it safer.

Faster and safer? Yes - you see real-time speed control

gets drivers going at lower speeds, but speeds which are more constant.

Cameras, electronic display boards, gantries -

all much cheaper than building a new lane.

What's the kind of increase in capacity you can get

on an existing stretch of motorway?

On a peak hour, this - in one direction -

carries between 5,000 and 6,000 vehicles.

So if we add capacity, we almost increase that

by about 2,000 vehicles, in each direction.

-Almost equivalent to an extra lane?

-It is.

-Because you've added an extra lane with the hard shoulder.

-Exactly.

So you're able to utilise that extra capacity -

it really does reduce the congestion.

I bet you one day, people will think of this

as a very early rudimentary kind of smart system for managing roads.

I'm adding infrastructure onto the existing motorway network.

Who's to say, in 15, 20, 30 years' time,

all of that technology could be in-car

and that will bring in even bigger improvements, you know,

in terms of how close we can drive to each other and safety, etc.

It's midnight - an empty motorway just outside Leeds.

Now, contrary to the impression that this particular one is giving you right at this moment,

Britain is in fact a crowded nation.

It's congested, we need more infrastructure,

but it's got to make sense, right,

for us to think hard about how we use what we've got,

and that means being clever, about being ambitious in design

to make sure that every inch of space is used most efficiently.

Now, that's not going to absolve us of the need to build more,

but boy, it can really make a difference.

Making a difference is what infrastructure is all about.

With design, technology, and a bit of intelligence,

we're better positioned to improve our infrastructure than we have been for years.

It'll just take a little will.

But there's a bonus too, if we can get on the right track.

The more we invest, the cheaper it gets.

Invest in a constant flow of new projects,

avoid sporadic bursts of construction

and the industry will be more efficient and more competitive.

It's a virtuous circle and it's there to be exploited.

And to make the point,

I'm now entering the underbelly of a project

that represents more than any

how much better we've become at getting on with things

once we decide to.

It's one of the biggest and most familiar

pieces of construction in the UK.

This is the bit of it you've never seen.

So, the main river lines are to our right,

then heading on north through the park,

we would get to the velodrome area.

'I think he's going to do it. Chris Hoy claims the gold medal!'

Further over to the west is the main stadium.

'Farah hits the front! Farah, it's gold!'

Basketball over to our left and handball to our right.

You've got it all down to a T. It's hilarious.

Not a great view from here of the games.

You still need to know where you are and where you need to get to.

Most of the spending on the Olympic park was above ground -

on the stadia that we're all too familiar with,

but the construction here was more of an achievement

than most people recognise.

It required a complex task of clearing the Olympic site of enormous electricity pylons

and getting these high voltage cables under ground into a vast network of tunnels and shafts.

They dug 12 kilometres of tunnels, 30 metres deep,

and in half the time it normally takes.

It's funny to think, isn't it,

that this is the least-known,

but arguably the single most important construction project

of the whole Olympic site.

Anything could have gone wrong.

They were trying to finish it very quickly,

but if they hadn't succeeded down here,

it would have been very hard to build an Olympic park up above.

But putting cables under ground

solved one problem and created another

because when they built the tunnels,

they knew the Olympics would be going on above,

but they didn't know exactly what was going to go above them.

We are currently under the London Aquatics Centre,

it in itself came after the tunnels were in location,

so we had to work very closely with the designers of the Aquatics Centre

to make sure that the Aquatics itself didn't overload the tunnel.

The Aquatics Centre

is one of the Olympics' most distinctive buildings,

and one of the most expensive,

but the delivery of the whole park -

on time and on budget, once there was a proper budget -

shows that High Speed 1 was not a one-off.

Indeed, many of those involved in High Speed 1 were involved here

and in both cases, the achievement was less the engineering,

more the successful management of construction and collaboration.

In an ideal world we wouldn't have put the tunnels under here,

but we were stuck for space, so that's where they went.

The man who led it was Sir John Armitt.

The great thing about an Olympics, you have to finish it on time.

There's a fixed end date.

Second thing - you really want political consensus,

and we've had political consensus.

Third thing, you can't be held up by planning.

We were given planning powers.

You can't be held back by your budget - you've got to have a sensible budget -

and we were given a sensible budget by Treasury

and then finally, you have to have the right commercial relationship with your supply chain

and I think we've had that here.

The right relationship between the Olympic delivery authority and their builders.

It's back to that all-important human factor -

preventing arguments getting in the way of the work.

And credit where credit is due -

behind the scenes, there was a secret to that success here.

It almost seems like the hero of the games -

-apart from your good self, of course...

-Yes.

-The hero of the Park...

-Is the new engineering contract.

-New engineering contract.

-Not so very new these days.

-NEC.

Probably 15 years old now. NEC, version 3 - design and build, target priced.

Would this park have been delivered as successfully without it?

No I don't think it would, you couldn't do it.

So, it was a document what won it.

A template for setting out

the responsibilities of contractors and customers,

a contract that has so far sorted out

some of the arguments so prevalent in earlier years.

It's been credited with turning around how infrastructure is delivered,

not just at the Olympics, but in the UK.

My theory is, we're on the cusp of the Golden Age here.

We've got High Speed 1, that went pretty well.

-This went pretty well. Terminal 5 went pretty well.

-Yes.

-Have we cracked it?

-There is an enormous opportunity

and this and other projects have shown the public

and shown the politicians what we can do.

So, what we now need is that leadership to say,

"Yes, we have the ability, we have the capability,

"we have low borrowing costs, money is cheap,

"we have people available, let's go and do it."

That is a popular call right now,

but we still have a lot to get right.

Finance, politics, faster decision making,

but surely they're all surmountable hurdles.

You get a spectacular view up here.

It feels so much higher than it looks down there.

You can see this fantastic Zaha Hadid roof,

you feel right up in the Gods, you could almost touch it.

Now, when you combine a need with an ability,

you can really be onto something.

We didn't need the Olympics, but it showed we had the ability

and we do need a lot of infrastructure in Britain right now.

Are we in for some kind of Golden Age?

Well that might be putting it a bit strongly.

Are we in for a highly productive era?

I hope so.

MUSIC: "Heroes" by David Bowie

What benefits has the last 150 years of infrastructure development in Britain brought to the country?

You can find out

with the Open University's Timeline.

Just go to our website and follow the links to the Open University.

# I will be king

# And you

# You will be queen

# Though nothing Will drive them away

# We can beat them

# Just for one day... #