The collapse of the South Station development deal may have come as a shock to some.

But this is one proposal that had been rotting quietly for quite some time.

The MBTA had hoped to add several tracks to South Station. It was all part grand deal that would see the Post Office sell its mail sorting complex to a private developer and then move its operations to another site in South Boston.

The Post Office would get a modern new plant, the T would get more tracks, and the developers, a combo of Jones Lang and Walton Street Capital, would get a big juicy site next to South Station to redevelop.

Everyone would be happy.

A nice idea, but as I wrote back in June in my weekly column for B&T, it was not to be.

Back then, some troubling signs were already emerging that this deal was not exactly on the fast track.

Postal officials had announced a deal with Jones Lang and Walton back in the spring of 2008 for a mega development and commuter rail expansion to replace the mail sorting plant.

Then the global financial crisis erupted a few months later in September of 2008, wiping out financing for most major projects.

By June of 2009, when I wrote my column predicting the project’s demise, I noted more than a year had passed with no sign of any proposal. In fact, city officials at that point had quietly scrapped plans to hire a consulant to draw up a master plan for the development of the site, a key first step.

Maybe even more telling, no one could even make it to the phone to offer up a phony defense of the project’s health.

Now the Patrick Adminstration wants to step in and by the mail sorting complex itself. Great, but the postal service still needs a place to relocate its plant to and, after years of debate, that’s still far from settled.

All I can say is good luck.

The $700 million redevelopment of the Filene’s complex is clearly a huge mess.

The project, which was to have renovated the turn-of-the-century department story and put up a skyscraper up next to it, has stalled, leaving a bombed out block in the heart of already struggling Downtown Crossing.

Given the problems, it’s natural that everyone is going to take a look at what went wrong.

The Globe takes a crack at it in Thursday’s edition, building a case that City Hall rushed through key approvals and left some paperwork unfinished to get the project into construction.

That may be so, but it also makes you wonder. The would-be developers, a partnership between local tower builder John Hynes and retail development giant Vornado, first submitted their plans to City Hall back in the fall of 2006.  But it took a whole year to get even preliminary approval, with work not starting until months later.

In the meantime, the business world and credit markets steadily deteriorated.

If this was a rush job, I can just imagine what happens when city officials decide they really need to slow a developer down.

If anything, this highlights the problems more than one developer has faced trying to slog through Boston’s at-times cumbersome development review process.

It can take years for a major development project to get all its approvals – or in the case of an alleged rush-job like Filene’s, more than a year. And as the developer cools his heels, the economic sands can easily shift under his feet.

It’s happened before. The billionaire Pritzker family had hoped to start building a new neighborhood on Fan Pier back in 2000, only to get caught in a morass of city and state red tape. The project finally won all its approvals in mid 2001, but by then the economy had turned and it was too late.

The result was a lost decade for Fan Pier.

Let’s not hope we have to wait another ten years to see work start again on the Filene’s project.