John McLellan: Trains and trams? Let’s have more of them

I like trains. I was brought up with a railway line running behind our house and as a wee boy in the school holidays trespassed on a daily basis, building dens in the embankment. And in term time, the Kirkhill and Newton trains took me to and from school. As a nine-year-old travelling on my own, I didn’t give going through Glasgow Central – now recognised as Britain’s busiest station outside London – a second thought. When I moved schools, Queen’s Park station was a doddle.

That’s why I was cheered by transport minister Keith Brown’s £30 million fund for new railway stations, even if it could take two years to materialise. New stations don’t just give people quicker and cleaner ways to get to work or up to town for a night out, they give a sense of place, permanence and core to communities. Even places such as Corrour feel like wilderness yet are very much part of the rest of Scotland. Bus stops just don’t do that for me, so maybe there is an argument for the Borders Rail link stopping at Stow after all.

And I can’t help but yearn for services to return to long-disused lines, even if I know it’s impossible. How handy would a re-built Balerno line in Edinburgh be, with the Merchiston station reconstructed beneath Harrison Road? Well, not very handy for the people living on Bryson Road, drivers along the West Approach Road or Standard Life’s entire HQ staff.

That being said, I never really saw the point of Crosshill station on the Cathcart Circle in Glasgow – a short walk away from Mount Florida station, plenty of buses going by and a dank, narrow platform below street level from which very few people ever seemed to emerge. Similarly, as much as I’d love to see passenger services on the old South Sub line in Edinburgh, I can’t see people in the likes of Blackford and Morningside waiting for a circular train service when they can take a direct bus to more destinations than just Waverley.

And for longer distances, a well-run train service beats the plane, even if it takes longer. The four hours to London on the East Coast line mean arriving at the other end feeling much more relaxed than the battle with boarding passes, officious and intrusive security screening, stacking, taxi-ing and everything else which makes flying so fraught. The hour saved seem hardly worth it. Of course, a badly run service negates all of that – thank you the little Hitler on a packed Cross Country service to Glasgow this week who threatened to throw people off for having the temerity to argue that they were entitled to be on the train with a valid ticket, and perhaps extra carriages might be a help.

I whisper it, but I like trams too. Towns with trams always seem, well, more sophisticated. Even Manchester. Maybe that’s why I was suckered into supporting the Edinburgh tram scheme in 2006, when I was editor of the Evening News. Back then, the issues seemed clear – the business case stacked up, there was no more room for buses on Princes Street, heavy EU fines were looming for excessive pollution in streets like Shandwick Place, settlers were expected to flood into Granton and needed a fast means of getting to work at places like Edinburgh Park. Crucially, the hugely-successful chief executive of Lothian Buses and arch-tram sceptic, Neil Renilson, came on board and appeared fully supportive of the scheme.

Over in Dublin, it seemed to me that just the advent of the Luas system has turned what was a dog-eared city which still felt like the Glasgow of the ’60s in which I grew up into a modern, buzzing go-ahead capital. It didn’t happen overnight, and Dubliners endured a couple of years of pain during construction, not to mention a trebling of costs to a conservatively estimated €770m. But at least they got a system, and it wasn’t so bad that citizens didn’t approve of a subsequent extension to the Docklands (cost: €60m per kilometre) or plans to link up the two separate Luas lines at St Stephen’s Green. But then Ireland ran out of cash, and only recently has the St Stephen’s Green link-up been resurrected..

Before the Edinburgh scheme got under way, I was privileged to join a fact-finding trip to Dublin to go behind the scenes at its tram scheme, and the message couldn’t have been clearer from Dublin council officials – whatever you think might happen it will be worse, and when you are making provision for contingencies, double them. “You won’t know what you’ll find until you start digging up the streets,” we were told as the then-Edinburgh trams chief executive Michael Howell winced that such heresies should be uttered in front of a member of the press. “We know all that, and we’ve taken it into account,” he said.

Of course bitter, bitter experience tells us that they had done nothing of the sort, and for years the only digging being done on account of Edinburgh trams was the city getting into a bigger hole. Now the real digging is in earnest and the result is utter chaos in the West End.

Appropriately for the traditional home of the Hearts War Memorial, Haymarket now looks more like the Somme than the gateway to the Scottish capital, and if any West End retail business survives the next two years, I’ll be Mary Portas.

Mind you, the SRU must be chuffed to its last Hawick ball, judging by the spanking new steps currently rising up to the new tram station at Roseburn: its very own transport system to whisk supporters up to Teuchters on William Street and beyond. A maximum of five times a year, because, remember, Edinburgh Rugby will probably be flitting to Meadowbank.

And what we’re going to be left with is a line which breaks all the economic rules, primarily that heavy rail schemes are only viable if they run through densely populated areas and are in constant use beyond the rush hour. It’s fine for visitors coming in from the airport and those few commuters from Edinburgh Park who live in the city centre, but along the vast majority of the remaining Edinburgh route there simply aren’t any people apart from what we can politely call economically challenged Broomhouse – and even then only one side of the line is populated. It would be a basket case even if construction was on time and under budget, and the only case for pressing on is that the embarrassment factor would be too great.

So here is a counter-intuitive proposal – we need more trams. As it stands, the line is a white elephant and always will be. Much work has been done on Leith Walk, which does make sense from a passenger/population point of view because thousands of people live on either side of the route. And South Bridge traders beware, the old Line 4 plan to take trams from the Balmoral to the new Royal Infirmary is perfect tram territory – heavy population on both sides virtually the whole way, large numbers of students and academics who are not shackled by normal commuter work patterns and a major piece of public infrastructure at either end in the hospital and Waverley.

Many people have said that Edinburgh doesn’t need trams, but if the city is to grow, then the bus network can’t deal with it all – look at the number of services jostling for space on the main arteries even if First Group is about to axe its Midlothian service. The problem for Edinburgh isn’t that it doesn’t need trams, it’s that they aren’t in the right place.

High drama expected

THE full impact of the closure of the News of the World on Rupert Murdoch’s News Group is now apparent, with the revelation that the cost has hit some £250m and could go even higher. Claimants fees and damages as a result of phone-hacking have reached a staggering £23m, and again it could end up being more. One obvious conclusion from this is that senior executives must have calculated that continuing to publish would have eventually cost the company even more, presumably fearing that the whole house of cards would come crashing down. For James Murdoch, now no longer chairman of BSkyB and his credibility surely in tatters, it might as well have done.

Both James and his old man are due to face the Leveson inquiry, probably next month, and if their performance in front of MPs was dramatic (although there is less chance of custard pies in His Lordship’s courtroom), then these appearances could be positively Wagnerian. At my rather low-key appearance, Lord Leveson was at pains to point out to my colleague Jonathan Russell of the Herald that he was “not in attack mode”. I somehow doubt it will be the same for the Murdochs.