In Britain today, it takes longer to put up a small railway footbridge than it did to construct New York’s Empire State Building. In the early 1930s, the Empire State Building took a mere 13 months to build. Theale train station in Berkshire, by contrast, has been waiting for its new footbridge for over a decade now.

Provided there are no further delays, it will have taken £9.5million and 13 years to finish upgrading the tiny Theale station. As the Telegraph put it, that’s ‘the same length of time it took to build Big Ben or, according to the Bible, King Solomon’s Palace’. Theale station was promised upgrades way back in 2011, with a budget of £1.25million. Since then, a new ticket office was finished in 2014 – but it currently lies empty and unopened, thanks to the unfinished footbridge. Theale’s MP, Alok Sharma, called it a ‘case study’ in British inefficiency.

The failure to build Theale station’s footbridge is of course a huge pain for local passengers. But it is also symptomatic of the wider infrastructure crisis plaguing Britain.