Sunday, December 16, 2012

Stuttgart Space Port and Berlin Airport

The city of Stuttgart in Southern Germany is getting a brand new central train station.

They have had a "terminus" layout for over a century but decided to switch to a station where trains do not have to reverse to continue the journey.
Given the geographic limitations, the whole thing is going to be an underground station.

Just last week, an audit firm projected that the cost of Stuttgart's new train station is now roughly that of an inexpensive spaceport, it just went up another 2.3 billion Euros to 6.8 billion.

And, for a while now, the good people of Stuttgart only call half a train station their own.

The other half of the existing main building has already been demolished.

Together with the new Berlin main airport, another recent big venture marked by bad planning, bad execution and cost overruns, we get the impression that large projects in Germany turn out the same way as large projects anywhere else.

Some are done right from the get-go, and the rest will eventually get done.

A decade of delay, however, still compares favorably to the Cologne Cathedral, started in 1280 and finished in  1880.

No comments:

Post a Comment