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It's all a front though, and you will be astonished at the scale and complexity of the work going on behind the boarded up platforms - as you will see in the Dassault Systèmes article in this issue. In face we have two other railway related articles in this edition, dealing with the political hot potato of HS2 and the mass pedestrian analysis of visitors to major railway stations respectively.

The article on HS2 follows a brilliant presentation on the scope and rationale of the project by Professor Andrew McNaughton, the Technical Director of HS2, given at Bentley's Infrastructure Conference last November. The cost is colossal, the disruption to people's lives - the ones who live on the proposed route - will be unbearable, yet the unthinkable has to be considered.

The density of housing in this country has reached such a level that any long term improvements to road or rail networks are going to disadvantage some members of the community. Not to do so, however, blights future generations, who will be faced with exactly the same problems but at far higher cost, and with disruption to even more deeply established and committed populations.

As Professor McNaughton says, there are legions of protesters, representing every bit of human, flora and fauna interest, who are articulate, organised and adept at attracting the attentions of the media. HS2 advocates, representing the 'establishment' line, have a hard struggle putting across their views in an environment that currently favours the protesters.

The phenomenon is not just the preserve of HS2, but rears its head against many large scale infrastructure projects; Heathrow expansion, power stations (both nuclear and coal-fired), bypasses and so on.

I must admit I was not fully convinced by HS2 till I saw the presentation. Does it all really boil down to the presentation skills of the proposers of the project?

Part of the proposal relates to the rapid movement of passengers through the network, with trains arriving and departing in very rapid progression, disgorging and picking up passengers at an unbelievable rate for anyone - certainly for anyone who has had to travel back home from Paddington between 4 and 7pm on a weekday evening!

The HS2 revolution, aimed at meeting the needs of passengers before anything else, envisages a complete modernisation of booking and seat allocations using all of the most up to date social networking tools, guaranteeing passengers a seat when they need one and directing them precisely to the point of embarkation.

Such a feat cannot be achieved without an analysis of expected passenger flows within the main rail terminals and the surrounding areas, using solutions like MassMotion from Oasys, also the subject of an article in this issue. Actually, the figures quoted for passenger numbers and the frequency of trains are an order of magnitude above current passenger levels - HS2 obviously expects the service to be popular.

And some more rail facts! Apparently the early days of travel by steam railways were a factor in the development of Impressionism, allowing artists to get out more and explore the countryside, taking their easels and paints with them. It provided them with an extra stimulus from nature, allowing them to create rapid 'impressions' of what they had seen before they caught the last train back, according to Philip Hook, a Senior International Specialist at Sothebys.

With railways having such a cultural impact at the beginning of the twentieth century, who is to say that the arrival of HS2 will not prove equally propitious?