On Wed, 24 Nov 2004, Tom Anderson wrote:

How much of it is just inflation?

If you mean in the technical sense, then you could try
http://www.eh.net/hmit/ukcompare/
or some of the other calculators on the same site.

Mind you, (to take random examples) the question of what a
diesel-electric unit would have cost in the year 1830 isn't really
very meaningful, nor culd we make much sense of the question what York
Minster would cost to build from scratch today. So straight
comparisons are far from obvious.

On the other hand, today's contracts seem to be inflated also by a
whole string of "hangers-on" who wouldn't have featured in earlier
schemes. IMHO and YMMV, natch.