Letters: Train hopes

Transport Minister Keith Brown is to be congratulated for announcing the establishment of a £30 million Scottish Stations Investment Fund – to be available from 2014 (your report, 4 April).

You also rightly mapped numerous proposed new stations across Scotland which might benefit from these new monies. You did, however, leave out Abbeyhill and Portobello in the capital.

While new stations in many of the more rural locations listed would indeed be welcome additions to the network, we should never forget that it is in our cities that most people live _ and where congestion and poor journey times by road most predominate.

Serving thousands of people, stations such as Abbeyhill and Portobello will add real value to the role rail can play in moving folk quickly around our capital. Indeed, Edinburgh compares very, very poorly with Glasgow in this regard.

It is to be hoped that the monies available through the fund can help to redress this imbalance.

Lawrence Marshall

Capital Rail Action Group

King’s Road

Edinburgh

If THE map accompanying the “£30m fnd for new stations” piece (4 April) was supposed to show Scotland’s current railway network it was quite fanciful.

There were lines closed under Beeching (eg Callander to Crianlarich, Dumfries to Stranraer) or never even built (eg Oban to Inverary, Fort William to Inverness, Invergarry to Kyle and Portree, Inverness to Ullapool), and there was even a suggestion of the Dornoch Bridge.

£30m isn’t going to stretch that far at today’s prices, so a lot of people are going to be disappointed.

And Bannockburn is actually south (not north) of Stirling.

Lastly, it would be nice to have the name totems in Scottish Region blue rather than (English) Western Region chocolate.

Alasdair Taylor

Swanston Grove

Edinburgh