Study to consider Borders Railway extension

[fegguk]

The "rip roaring success" of the Borders line with one million passengers from a half hourly service always raises a smile here in Mid Wales where the Cambrian Mainline manages one million passengers a year with just 12 trains a day and without the benefit of commuters into a big city at one end.

This line is twice.the length of the Borders Railway,it is hardly otherwise comparable.

 

[Northhighland]

For the 70 miles to Carlisle, you are talking of at least £700 million (at 2012 prices) based on the costs of the line to Tweedbank. So in 2017 terms, you are looking at closer to £800 million. Add in the extra money you will need to spend on the existing section to upgrade the double track sections etc...?

If I had £800 million+ to spend, there are plenty of other transport projects which could better justify that money - albeit that I would think that extension to Hawick would probably make a reasonable business case.

You make a very good point. In remote areas, spending a bit of money on the rail system and a bit of money on the road system means you get two incomplete and suboptimal services. Rural areas need an integrated system, invest in roads, invest in bus links to the rail station and that will offer best advantage to the of us that live in rural areas. £700m in the borders could do a lot more than a train line to Edinburgh or Carlisle.

I am all for maximising rail travel, however not at any cost and people have to be hard headed and spend public money wisely.

 

[nuneatonmark]

What else would £800m get you, rail improvement wise? Re-open Okehampton to Plymouth? Re-open Leicester to Burton? Finish off electrification on Great Western, MML or in the north? There must be better ways of spending £800m?

It seems barmy to me to even consider it but then again the Scottish government always seem flush with money compared with England and Wales.

 

[backontrack]

People do want to travel from Hawick to Edinburgh, even if they're not commuting there. Hawick is the most deprived town in the Borders. If we know that a reopening would go a good way in reversing that (which we do), and if there is the population to justify it (which there is), and if there are other towns that we can connect this route to (which there are in Melrose and the Boswells) then we should go for it.

A reopening south of Hawick, however, is less urgent. The key, as always, is integration and connectivity. A good bus route will do when you can't quite justify a rail service.
The Border Buses route X95 bus links together most of the remaining destinations - Selkirk, Langholm, Longtown and Carlisle - and has an interchange with the railway at Galashiels (and would also connect at Hawick).

What other forms of expansion are there? Should we open lines from St Boswells to Jedburgh and Kelso? Should we open a line from Eskbank to Penicuik, Peebles and Innerleithen? Or should we open a branch from Tweedbank to Selkirk? Erm...discuss?

 

[och aye]

I'd be amazed if the report comes back recommending anything more than extending the line to Hawick and adding more additional passing loops to the existing line.

 

[47271]

People do want to travel from Hawick to Edinburgh, even if they're not commuting there. Hawick is the most deprived town in the Borders. If we know that a reopening would go a good way in reversing that (which we do), and if there is the population to justify it (which there is), and if there are other towns that we can connect this route to (which there are in Melrose and the Boswells) then we should go for it.

A reopening south of Hawick, however, is less urgent. The key, as always, is integration and connectivity. A good bus route will do when you can't quite justify a rail service.
The Border Buses route X95 bus links together most of the remaining destinations - Selkirk, Langholm, Longtown and Carlisle - and has an interchange with the railway at Galashiels (and would also connect at Hawick).

What other forms of expansion are there? Should we open lines from St Boswells to Jedburgh and Kelso? Should we open a line from Eskbank to Penicuik, Peebles and Innerleithen? Or should we open a branch from Tweedbank to Selkirk? Erm...discuss?

I'll all for Hawick, but Levenmouth please before we think too hard about anything else south of Edinburgh.

 

[fegguk]

People on here need to stop worrying about extending the Borders Railway south of Hawick it is not going to happen any time soon. The more apparently sensible politicians know this, they just want to be seen to be interested and appear to be doing something. The other politicians either don’t have a clue or in the case of the Greens have a vision of a different transport paradigm. Unless the feasibility study can come up with some magic trick no one has thought about, the study is just going to set out the conventional reasons to say NO.

The 17 mile section north of Hawick might have a chance, though it’s hard to see where the money will come from. The Scottish Government are struggling to fund £3 billion earmarked for dualing the A9 so it will be well into the next decade before the buffers at Tweedbank can be removed. In reality probably longer given the other schemes that are being proposed and the fact that the Borders is usually at the bottom of the pile.

The cost benefit case for improving the A7 south of Hawick will be just as bad as the railway. Judging by past schemes it will cost just as much if not more per mile than the railway for only modest improvements in journey times. However unlike the railway the money can be spent piece meal rather than being all or nothing. At the current spending rate it works out about 1-2 miles per decade. So it will take until 2117 to do another10-20 miles. In the end the A7 is only a local road serving the Borders it is not a through route. That is what the M74 is for. It has the same problems as the Waverley route vs the West Coast mainline in this respect.

Then there is that Green transport paradigm noted above where an integrated, high quality, public transport network might have to include the Borders. It is still legitimate to campaign for that and pull the unexpected rabbit from the hat without believing in the railway fairies. If we expect the trend in less car dependence to continue, eventually not having rail connection to the south will limit the Borders economy. Just don’t expect this to happen soon or form part of this feasibility study.

 

[backontrack]

I'll all for Hawick, but Levenmouth please before we think too hard about anything else south of Edinburgh.

That goes without saying.

Then there is that Green transport paradigm noted above where an integrated, high quality, public transport network might have to include the Borders. It is still legitimate to campaign for that and pull the unexpected rabbit from the hat without believing in the railway fairies. If we expect the trend in less car dependence to continue, eventually not having rail connection to the south will limit the Borders economy. Just don’t expect this to happen soon or form part of this feasibility study.

Exactly.

 

[Bald Rick]

It is not going to happen.

The current Borders Railway would not be built if it was proposed now; at least not south of Gorebridge. The timing of the bill was opportune - to test out certain new procedures in the Scottish Parliament, and more than anything to demonstrate to the Scottish population (and Westminster) that Scotland was in control of its own destiny and could get stuff done. No need to do any of that now, and besides there is no money.

 

[snowball]

The Scottish Government are struggling to fund £3 billion earmarked for dualing the A9

And, I imagine, the similar sum for the A96, though the timescale for that is 5 years longer.

 

[Gareth Marston]

And, I imagine, the similar sum for the A96, though the timescale for that is 5 years longer.

The Chairman of my local RUG stepped down earlier this year and is looking to move back to NE Scotland from Mid Wales, hes utterly horrified at the scale of the SNP's "road improvement agenda".

 

[47271]

The Chairman of my local RUG stepped down earlier this year and is looking to move back to NE Scotland from Mid Wales, hes utterly horrified at the scale of the SNP's "road improvement agenda".

Clearly he hasn't driven on either the A9 or the A96 for many years then.

 

[snowball]

Clearly he hasn't driven on either the A9 or the A96 for many years then.

Traffic counts on UK roads can be easily seen on SABRE Maps:

https://www.sabre-roads.org.uk/maps/

Roads with the traffic levels of the A9 or A96 would stand no chance of getting dualled throughout if they were in England or Wales.

 

[Clip]

What else would £800m get you, rail improvement wise? Re-open Okehampton to Plymouth? Re-open Leicester to Burton? Finish off electrification on Great Western, MML or in the north? There must be better ways of spending £800m?
.

Why would the Scottish govt want to spend any of their money on those schemes?

 

[47271]

Traffic counts on UK roads can be easily seen on SABRE Maps:

https://www.sabre-roads.org.uk/maps/

Roads with the traffic levels of the A9 or A96 would stand no chance of getting dualled throughout if they were in England or Wales.

That 20 minute wait last weekend to make a right turn on to the A9 behind a queue of 12 vehicles must've been in my imagination then!

Are you seriously suggesting that the A9 should be left in its present condition?

 

[Gareth Marston]

Traffic counts on UK roads can be easily seen on SABRE Maps:

https://www.sabre-roads.org.uk/maps/

Roads with the traffic levels of the A9 or A96 would stand no chance of getting dualled throughout if they were in England or Wales.

I spent a week in August in Blair Atholl two summers ago and drove on the A9 a lot quite frankly the A483/A458 road between Newtown, Welshpool and Shrewsbury is busier than I found the A9.

The SNP have it in their heads that "Scotland has been deliberately dis invested in" and things like the A9 dualling have become part of this agenda rather than anybody engaging their brain and looking at the real world situation. The Welsh Government were bad for this in its early days but to a degree this has been knocked out of them by the realities of devolved administration over a number of years, the SNP are still fairly new to the real world of actually being in charge and making decisions and controlling budgets.

Here in Wales the Labour controlled Welsh Government has settled into a happy rut of political squabbling with Tory Westminster since 2010 as a way of distracting from the constraints of being in charge of the budget.

 

[NotATrainspott]

I spent a week in August in Blair Atholl two summers ago and drove on the A9 a lot quite frankly the A483/A458 road between Newtown, Welshpool and Shrewsbury is busier than I found the A9.

The SNP have it in their heads that "Scotland has been deliberately dis invested in" and things like the A9 dualling have become part of this agenda rather than anybody engaging their brain and looking at the real world situation. The Welsh Government were bad for this in its early days but to a degree this has been knocked out of them by the realities of devolved administration over a number of years, the SNP are still fairly new to the real world of actually being in charge and making decisions and controlling budgets.

Here in Wales the Labour controlled Welsh Government has settled into a happy rut of political squabbling with Tory Westminster since 2010 as a way of distracting from the constraints of being in charge of the budget.

The A9/A96 dualling is a programme proposed and implemented by a democratically elected government. While you might not think it is the best use of money, it is the 'will of the people' that it should go ahead. There's no great political campaign against it (other than the standard whinging from the green lobby) and any criticism of the SNP is mostly about the project not being built fast enough.

The Scottish Parliament/Government has a budget to spend and it would be spending it on something else if it weren't for this. It doesn't have any responsibility for England, Wales or Northern Ireland, so problems there should be directed to their own governments and administrations.

Also, you should note that the A9 is pretty much the only route north from the Central Belt to the entire north of Scotland without an enormous detour. Your Newtown-Welshpool-Shrewsbury road might be important but it is just one of many roads leading to a much less strategically important part of Great Britain. The bit of Scotland that depends on the A9 is almost as big as the whole of Wales. Almost everyone in Scotland has some experience of the A9 given its importance, which is why there's general political agreement about the dualling being a good thing. It's less controversial than the concept of the Queensferry Crossing, at least.

 

[JohnR]

That 20 minute wait last weekend to make a right turn on to the A9 behind a queue of 12 vehicles must've been in my imagination then!

Are you seriously suggesting that the A9 should be left in its present condition?

And how much of that could be reduced by investment in the HML and taking traffic (especially slow moving freight) off the roads and onto the rails?

 

[InOban]

We are however perfectly free to criticise their decisions. After all, the climate change act instructed the ScoGov to deliver a 50% reduction in transport-related CO2 emissions by 2030, a target towards which they have signally failed to aid any significant progress.
A previous poster referred to what is the key problem with the road as it exists: the huge number of flat junctions. I regularly use the last few miles into Inverness, already dualled. There are five flat junctions in about one mile; the one I use carries HGVs to and from the major sand/gravel quarry.
Clearly a program of work was required to make all the major junctions grade-separated, and to close the minor ones, but as others have said it is nowhere near busy enough to justify dualling throughout. When I join it, I barely have to glance to my right to check for traffic.
The problem with the familiar devotion to Grand Projets is that it leaves no money left to improve the secondary trunk roads that give access to the primary network. For the past ten years and more, these routes have been essentially on care and maintenance, inhibiting economic development away from these primary routes.

 

[snowball]

That 20 minute wait last weekend to make a right turn on to the A9 behind a queue of 12 vehicles must've been in my imagination then!

On what was probably one of the half dozen busiest days of the year. Most authorities responsible for roads do not consider it economical to design them for exceptional peaks.

Are you seriously suggesting that the A9 should be left in its present condition?

What I'm seriously suggesting is what I said in #193, which is fact.

The Scottish government is proposing to upgrade the A9 and A96 to dual carriageway throughout, with all junctions grade separated, and is having to fiddle the cost-benefit figures to pretend that this is value for money. In England or Wales a more selective approach would be taken, to meet clearly identified needs, which might well include doing something about the junction where you had to wait.

Gareth Marston mentioned part of the the A483. As it happens I spent a few days in the same area last week. A bypass is under construction for Newtown. The bypass will be a single carriageway with three lanes (generally two uphill, one down). Minor roads will cross it by bridges but it will have a flat roundabout at each end and two more in the middle where it crosses A roads. The traffic level on its western end will be similar to that on the least busy part of the A96, about 8k a day. The rest of the bypass will be busier than most of the A9 between Perth and Inverness.

A lot of roads in England with traffic volumes similar to the A9 or A96 are the responsibility of local authorities who can only dream of affording significant improvements.

 

[Starmill]

Also, you should note that the A9 is pretty much the only route north from the Central Belt to the entire north of Scotland without an enormous detour. Your Newtown-Welshpool-Shrewsbury road might be important but it is just one of many roads leading to a much less strategically important part of Great Britain. The bit of Scotland that depends on the A9 is almost as big as the whole of Wales. Almost everyone in Scotland has some experience of the A9 given its importance, which is why there's general political agreement about the dualling being a good thing. It's less controversial than the concept of the Queensferry Crossing, at least.

In which case, the Scottish Government is not really doing its job properly is it?

The job of government is to find what is generally politically popular and sound and try to enact that in ways that offer good value for money.

The fact that money is being spent on projects with demonstrably awful value for money like the southern end of the Borders Railway and the A9 dualling means that Scots will collectively all be poorer in the future than they would have been if the money had been prioritised according to more shrewd assessment of the returns, such as building new stations, making targeted safety improvements and doing CCTV schemes on major roads, bus priority schemes, faster mobile data and so on and so on. Single carriageway improvements with increased overtaking opportunities and safer junctions can bring almost all of the benefits that the A9 dualling scheme will (especially with its all-grade-separated junctions) at much lower cost.

You can of course make the case that there is a great social benefit that is not being captured by the traditional methods - but there is a reason it isn't captured, and that's because it's intangible and difficult to measure. I can see the case for social benefits that result from a railway for Galashiels. I cannot see any that result from driving an unnecessary dual carriageway through the Highlands.

 

[haggishunter]

You can of course make the case that there is a great social benefit that is not being captured by the traditional methods - but there is a reason it isn't captured, and that's because it's intangible and difficult to measure. I can see the case for social benefits that result from a railway for Galashiels. I cannot see any that result from driving an unnecessary dual carriageway through the Highlands.

That's easy to say sitting in Manchester connected to a motorway network in every direction. Pre the major schemes that have occurred post devolution the internal connectivity within Scotland was appalling, because investment in what are critical inter-city routes to the Scottish economy was measured against a matrix applied to England.

Inverness and Aberdeen are far more important drivers to the economy of Scotland than comparable sized places in England are to the English economy and as stated above when major arterial routes close in the North of Scotland for any reason, diversions are often huge or not available - so making the network as safe and resilient as possible with reliable journey times is an important objective in itself.

The cost benefit ratios traditionally used encourage overheating a few locations - an objective of the Scottish Government with the A9 and A96 dualling and HML and AIIP projects is to create a genuine intercity network between all of Scotland's cities to help spread economic opportunity and growth throughout Scotland, repopulating Highland Scotland after finally reversing 3 centuries of decline. The population of the area that approximates to the Highland Council today is only 50% of that in 1707.

Perhaps you could call it nation building. Which is exactly why some seem to have a problem with it, they'd rather the major Scottish towns and cities were treated as minor provincial towns with the transport and services to match. That Scotland's two biggest cities were only this year connected by a direct continuous motorway and the principle rail route between the two will also only later this year switch to electric traction is hardly an endorsement of the Union?

 

[NotATrainspott]

In which case, the Scottish Government is not really doing its job properly is it?

The job of government is to find what is generally politically popular and sound and try to enact that in ways that offer good value for money.

The fact that money is being spent on projects with demonstrably awful value for money like the southern end of the Borders Railway and the A9 dualling means that Scots will collectively all be poorer in the future than they would have been if the money had been prioritised according to more shrewd assessment of the returns, such as building new stations, making targeted safety improvements and doing CCTV schemes on major roads, bus priority schemes, faster mobile data and so on and so on. Single carriageway improvements with increased overtaking opportunities and safer junctions can bring almost all of the benefits that the A9 dualling scheme will (especially with its all-grade-separated junctions) at much lower cost.

You can of course make the case that there is a great social benefit that is not being captured by the traditional methods - but there is a reason it isn't captured, and that's because it's intangible and difficult to measure. I can see the case for social benefits that result from a railway for Galashiels. I cannot see any that result from driving an unnecessary dual carriageway through the Highlands.

I'm well aware that smaller, targeted interventions can easily have much higher BCRs. Very small schemes can have BCRs in the double digits. My belief is though that the idea that spending £3 billion on all of these things instead would be massively, enormously better than spending it on one grand projet might not be quite right. If you went about improving each and every junction on the A9, you would end up encouraging more traffic to use it without the main road being upgraded to cope. Each project individually might have a high BCR, but a package of every single one of them combined might not.

What would you do with the full £3bn for the A9 dualling anyway? As far as I can tell, the pipeline for other plausible infrastructure projects with good BCRs in Scotland couldn't actually use all of it. How many stations are worth building and would require Scottish Government funding? Junction improvements are likewise great, but how many of them really are there? Laurencekirk? Sure, but that project is in the pipeline anyway. Nice wee things like the Pulpit Rock works or the Crianlarich Bypass which get rid of major A82 pinch-points have already been done, leaving only big and costly things like the whole Tarbet-Inverarnan upgrade. You'll always be limited by the law of diminishing returns, and the relatively low BCR of the big schemes is because they're plonked quite firmly at the diminished end of that scale. It would obviously be great if there were £3bn worth of small schemes with high BCRs but I really don't see how that would happen.

Investing in better mobile data is a great idea, except for how it's privatised and Holyrood has minimal control over it. I can't see a big cash injection into the major private mobile companies having that much of a long term effect. If they don't want to bother building 4G towers in the Highlands now, why would they bother with 5G, 6G in future? If the government is always the one to cough up, then why bother doing private investment? I don't oppose the idea in concept, but it would require changes to the mobile networks which are well beyond the purview of Holyrood. A Network Rail-style state-owned-but-run-privately benevolent infrastructure-only monopoly where the other networks become MVNOs would be great and would make government investment much more practical.

If you run out of good things to spend capital investment on, then you obviously can look at other things as well. But, there's only so many capital investments which make sense. Housing might be the default demand but it can and should be the case that it doesn't need capital investment like roads do. With the end of right-to-buy councils should now be able to borrow commercially to build housing, using the guaranteed income from council tenants and the scale and efficiency they can bring to construction and maintenance. There shouldn't be many schemes which could only go ahead with central government capital investment, as then it must be the case that the rental income can't pay for them. You don't want councils building homes which they couldn't then sell profitably at market rates.

 

[Altnabreac]

In which case, the Scottish Government is not really doing its job properly is it?

The job of government is to find what is generally politically popular and sound and try to enact that in ways that offer good value for money.

The fact that money is being spent on projects with demonstrably awful value for money like the southern end of the Borders Railway and the A9 dualling means that Scots will collectively all be poorer in the future than they would have been if the money had been prioritised according to more shrewd assessment of the returns, such as building new stations, making targeted safety improvements and doing CCTV schemes on major roads, bus priority schemes, faster mobile data and so on and so on. Single carriageway improvements with increased overtaking opportunities and safer junctions can bring almost all of the benefits that the A9 dualling scheme will (especially with its all-grade-separated junctions) at much lower cost.

You can of course make the case that there is a great social benefit that is not being captured by the traditional methods - but there is a reason it isn't captured, and that's because it's intangible and difficult to measure. I can see the case for social benefits that result from a railway for Galashiels. I cannot see any that result from driving an unnecessary dual carriageway through the Highlands.

I think perhaps you underestimate the symbolic importance of network connectivity.

In my view more dualling at either end plus more WS2+1 would probably have met the traffic flow needs but I can see why a strategic decision was made to go with a high spec, dualled route all the way to Inverness to improve the perceived connectivity as much as anything else.

Borders Rail has had a similar effect and I suspect the last section of A1(M) will have a similar importance for NE England.

Sometimes Transport investment has to be about more than just strict BCRs and reflect wider economic priorities. I think the A9 is one of those.

 

[InOban]

I think perhaps you underestimate the symbolic importance of network connectivity.

In my view more dualling at either end plus more WS2+1 would probably have met the traffic flow needs but I can see why a strategic decision was made to go with a high spec, dualled route all the way to Inverness to improve the perceived connectivity as much as anything else.

Borders Rail has had a similar effect and I suspect the last section of A1(M) will have a similar importance for NE England.

Sometimes Transport investment has to be about more than just strict BCRs and reflect wider economic priorities. I think the A9 is one of those.

Not wider economic priorities, rather political priorities. The whole point about having BCR studies is to bring impartial evidence into decision making. There are occasions where it is inadequate, eg when there is little benefit in the individual components of a large project, the gain all coming at end. On the basis of BCR you might never start. And I don't know what's the BCR for the rebuilding of Glasgow QS, but it will pay handsomely when it is necessary to run longer trains throughout the network. It is the key that unlocks the whole.
But I agree with the other posters that there are dozens of smaller, less glamourous projects that should have taken precedence over dualling the A9, let alone the A96.

 

[railjock]

Not wider economic priorities, rather political priorities. The whole point about having BCR studies is to bring impartial evidence into decision making. There are occasions where it is inadequate, eg when there is little benefit in the individual components of a large project, the gain all coming at end. On the basis of BCR you might never start. And I don't know what's the BCR for the rebuilding of Glasgow QS, but it will pay handsomely when it is necessary to run longer trains throughout the network. It is the key that unlocks the whole.
But I agree with the other posters that there are dozens of smaller, less glamourous projects that should have taken precedence over dualling the A9, let alone the A96.

And probably as many with better BCR than opening the railway to Tweedbank, but there's more to life than BCRs.

 

[InOban]

But there's no sensible discussion about the allocation of limited resources without them.

 

[Starmill]

I think perhaps you underestimate the symbolic importance of network connectivity.

If you are pragmatic and clever, you can achieve symbolism without blowing hundreds of millions of pounds of taxpayers cash. I agree that symbolism and to some extent nationalism and devolution is a big factor and understand the effects of that - but that doesn't make the course of action any more fruitful.

If I were Scottish, I would look at a prudent, clever, balanced budget and thing "Yes, this is how we should forge our own way in the world, by doing the best we can with what we already and fighting for more resources.". I would not look at a large road-building project and think how amazing it is that we are embarking on a new Golden Age for Scotland with a cornerstone project like a dual carriageway that signifies how ambitious and prosperous we are at a glance.

 

[Starmill]

That's easy to say sitting in Manchester connected to a motorway network in every direction.

I don't drive - and it is very rare I travel by car, so the my assessment of those Motorways is that they provide large amounts of noise and air pollution close to my home.

 

[fegguk]

But there's no sensible discussion about the allocation of limited resources without them.

True, but how you define and add up the costs and benefits makes a big difference to the answer you get. The process is not a exact science and it is always to some extent skewed in favour of the results that those who commission such studies have an ideological faith in.