12 November 2012
High speed plans a complete omnishambles
With "omnishambles" recently being named the
OED's word of the year, Transform Scotland's director Colin Howden has chosen to employ it to describe the Scottish Government's spectacularly vague plans for high-speed rail between Edinburgh and Glasgow. Colin Howden said:
"Until four months ago, the Scottish Government had plans to electrify most of the rail routes in central Scotland through the Edinburgh-Glasgow Improvement Programme (EGIP). That would have given us 35 minute end-to-end journeys between Edinburgh and Glasgow by 2016. Then they scrapped half of that."Now, instead, what we have is Nicola Sturgeon saying that we might have 30 minute journey times and we might have them by 2024."What’s the cost of this? Pass. What’s the route? Pass. Whose land is it going to go through? Pass. What’s the cost-benefit ratio? Pass. Where would we get the money from? Pass. These are some pretty important questions to start with."Then there is the question of do we even need it? We are broadly in favour of high-speed rail – but high speed rail between Edinburgh and Glasgow? We are not really persuaded that that is what we need."What we do need is higher quality rail services - but we had proposals for those and they were scrapped. "It does make you wonder who is advising the Scottish Ministers. The Government would be better focussed on a programme of journey time improvements and capacity enhancements so that all Scottish cities can be linked by a modern, efficient rail system."Journey times on key inter-urban corridors from the Central Belt to Aberdeen and to Inverness remain uncompetitive because of the lack of investment over many years."For example, in 1895, the fastest journey time between Edinburgh & Dundee took 59 minutes – when nowadays the fastest is around 64 minutes. In 1913, the fastest Edinburgh-Perth train trip took 65 minutes, while it now takes closer to 80 minutes. Driving down these journey times down would be a much better focus for Nicola Sturgeon’s rail policy."