There seems to be something uniquely British in its engineering culture which allows for the left-field hack-it-simply-together-and-hope-it-works approach. I'm

There seems to be something uniquely British in its engineering culture which allows for the left-field hack-it-simply-together-and-hope-it-works approach. I'm guessing that the initial build was exactly this. Maybe the equipment is highly specialised for the UK, and other countries have their own standards?I imagine these custom standards are hard to just rip out and replace. It is also hard to convince a bunch of engineers who know a set of tools, and proprietary formats and hardware to change to something they don't know, with something that is so critical to a nations infrastructure.