The Scottish government budget was announced last week so this is all the documentation to go along with it.
Mentioned in other documents (see
this website for the full list of reports) are a couple of interesting points. Be warned, there are about eight individual reports that relate to railways, not including the full list of recommendations posted by CLC. Would recommend reading only if you have a lot of free time.
- Fife circle and Levenmouth, and the Borders line are next in the lost for electrification, after the East Kilbride lines. The rationale behind East Kilbride seems to be replacement of the 156s, the report says "these will become life expired around 2025." Doesn't seem much time to order new stuff for the rural routes in that case. Looks like the 158s and 170s from Fife and Tweedbank routes will be cascaded after the knitting goes up.
- Waverley, Glasgow Central, Perth and Inverness stations each get a big bucket of money to be fixed. Waverley masterplan is obviously in the works, and we've seen plans for Inverness and Perth, but Glasgow Central could be interesting.
- Glasgow and Edinburgh each get funding for transit improvements, read: Edinburgh trams and Glasgow metro. One of the reports mentioned converting the Cathcart lines to metro which has been talked about on here a lot, but could be interesting. *NOTE, the documents do not allocate funding, instead this is a commitment to fund whatever the business case comes up with.
- Multimodal funding. There's a huge chunk of change going for creation of multimodal hubs, and improvements of joined up public transport. This is spread across all transport, but there seems to be a desire to make connections between ferries, busses and trains easier. Combined with improvements already planned at Ardrossan, this could be interesting. We might finally see some progress towards joined up public transport.
- Rail freight funding. The main example given is W12 clearance of the GSW route, but there are some interesting things in there. The class 93s get a mention as well!!!
There's a couple of other things about bringing forward more renewals and enhancements in order to do gauge clearance for wires simultaneously, which will be a big help, in addition to the funding for the Aberdeen line mentioned above. Looks interesting
EDIT: Didn't notice before, but there's an interesting nod to the Orion project in there. The station redevelopments should provide access for light freight and roll cages to be transshipped for onward travel in electric vehicles.