I have to join the growing band of Thales-knockers on this.
I was involved in the design and delivery of a web-front-end for a UK rail ticketing application, which I believe was at least as complex as the AIS back-end, and this was initially delivered in a lot less than a year.
Even the first release was handling way more than 1000 transactions a day! (and it was actually over a 256K link, IO540!)
There must be something more than purely technical issues behind the delays.
SD