YOUR readers C Maclean and J Macnab (Letters, August 9 & 10) are correct in pointing out that the flooding issues at Winchburgh have been known for many years, and must be resolved to ensure fast, frequent trains between Edinburgh and Glasgow. But it must be pointed out that the two cities are already better rail-connected than any comparable cities in the UK, and probably in Europe. There are now five different routes between them, with a normal weekday timetable of 13 trains per hour in total. That is better than one train every four-and-a-half minutes. Hardly a poor service. The longest route (via Carstairs) was electrified by the early nineties; the other four within the past five years, by which time transport policy was the responsibility of the Scottish Government.
The real issue to be addressed is: why are there no high speed trains between the two cities? "Bullet trains" have linked Japanese cities at double the speed of Britain’s fastest trains since the 1960s, and the French have had TGVs since about a decade later. The UK got its first and only high speed line only because French TGVs operated to the Calais end of the tunnel, and were eventually almost matched by higher speeds through Kent. Meantime there are networks, not single lines, of high speed trains in France, Spain, Italy, Belgium, Netherlands, and Germany.
Most pertinently to Scotland, Denmark, a country of about our size, and population, has just opened its first high speed (c250kph) railway between Copenhagen and Ringsted, a distance similar to Edinburgh-Glasgow. It is intended as the first stage of such trains linking the capital and Aarhus, its second city, and also to the German border. It can carry up to about 20 trains per hour, at more than twice the speed of the fastest trains between Edinburgh and Glasgow. And it frees up existing conventional track to carry many more slow freight and suburban passenger trains. So it is a most environmentally-friendly initiative.
Whilst England dithers over whether to construct its second high speed line between London and Birmingham, Scotland could half the journey time between its two biggest cities, and hugely increase total rail capacity. That new high-speed link, and not the rebuilding of the Winchburgh tunnel, should be Scotland’s next step in transport investment.
It’s interesting that I am only aware that Denmark has been operating high speed trains for over two months, because as a transport economist I make it my business to read obscure wee technical journals. Not a blink about it in the popular media, either Scots or UK… unless I missed it. Yet surely the Danish example is proof of what Scotland can do? We’re an obscure wee peninsula in northern Europe too; it’s just the Danes can decide their own priorities.
Dougie Harrison, Milngavie.
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