Yes agreed - Bouygues, Dragados, etc run big projects in the UK. Often the case that many of the senior contractor staff are French. Relatedly, I would love to sit down with some of those firms and work out why projects go so much better elsewhere

The contractor I work with is Al*tom lmao

Effiage building the HS2 Bat Tunnel and the same for diff projects in France is something that needs to be studied

It's not ignorance per se imho but procurement practices, regulations, and honestly sometimes just chauvinism but as the bat tunnel discourse shows the same companies and sometimes the same engineers operate in Britain and France, why the different results?

I don't think the situation in Britain is comparable to say America or Canada - given that we regularly interact with French, German, Italian professionals on a daily basis

We also rely a lot on ad-hoc signage and boards too much which a customisable LED display should fix, should be much cheaper than handwritten signs and printed boards

I think the insularity of British practices is even more egregious than the others, given that french and Italian and German contractors work with us on a daily basis!

Yep!

one thing where we can be a lot more efficient - it really seems like we keep trains for like 12hrs or for two 12hr shifts more often than not

Turnaround time is quite long , tools for a lot of stuff is basically kept locked up in a vending machine or in the store, engineers are not assigned their own tools, if it's being used - you have to wait or borrow it