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“It took us four weeks to build what you are about to see,” says Jim O’Boyle, a Coventry city councillor. The sight is not exactly spectacular. Behind a fence in the city centre, a small team of workers have constructed a short tram line. The tracks begin abruptly outside an estate agent, run gently downhill, turn a corner, then stop after a mere 220 metres. But the humdrum nature of the project is the exciting thing about it.
This type of design has many problems. Without utility relocation, the tram gets interrupted whenever there is utility work. And not having a proper foundation under the rails means horrible ride quality and/or trams limited to very slow speeds.
That’s not necessarily the case, a lot of repairs are done intercepting the issue from the sides and digging underneath. You see this method constantly. If every repair needed full access from above, any repair would be prohibitive