REPORTS of people coming to COP by train (when normally they’d never choose such a form of transport!) then hitting the problems consequent from lack of investment into climate chaos are amusing me. Why shouldn’t I be allowed a small laugh at their expense, given how much I was laughed at decades ago by everyone for choosing train over car or plane (assuming the journey allowed such) when I was travelling.

Last century I spent many a cold, draughty wait in stations (though in time punctuality did improve). It was at some cost, for if you truly care about something you have to be prepared to put your money where your mouth is! Distant travel, eg to the south of England or even Europe for holidays with the family (alas that lost Rosyth ferry!), meant additional costs of overnight stays too, often enough. You had to be rich enough to afford an environmental conscience! Once I even had someone (who in later years became an environmental leader!) challenge me as to why I didn’t fly. I said nothing: it seemed too smugly self-righteous to give my reasons.

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Until very recently it has been hard work trying to live for the sake of the planet, but there is so much people can do – simple, inexpensive adaptations as well as costly changes – that do bring long-term savings. Once it was my pipe-dream to run an electric car, but a small £5,000 secondhand “ZOE” with plenty of charge points in our area of Scotland – plus our solar PV, which has already paid for itself in returns of home-generated electricity – means that I am today living my dream.

Catriona de Voil
Arbroath

MALCOLM Bruce makes a fine point (Letters, Nov 1) about the Stranraer railway line. It is beautiful, however the cost to travel it is extortionate. I live midway between Stranraer and Glasgow but the former is double the cost. No per km fare in Scotland is so unfair. Add on trains that are generally dirty – a daily clean only – and you begin to see why a large amount of Galloway folk use their cars and vote Tory. Last week a friend from the mainland (of Europe) visited and was disappointed at the overall lack of infrastructure in the south-west relative to the Moray Firth, where we had visited.

Never would I say the North Midlands should not prosper, but surely the south-west should be invested in equally. You only need to disembark from a train at each of the areas two main towns to see a disgraceful contrast. Inverness – pristine with a hotel attached to the railway station. Ayr – disgusting for a terminus station. A portacabin for a ticket office, and the adjoining hotel has been a ruin for several years and looks set to continuing decaying for many more.

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Roads? The A9 north of Perth I would not complain too much about, yet I can understand why some do. The A77 south of Ayr is the main road to Errin; it is easily the worst trunk road in the country and extremely rare to be commented on in national media. It is a national disgrace.

I have lived throughout Scotland over the past 40 years, and the south-west is sadly and badly neglected. Even in media coverage it is a forgotten area. South of Girvan was the last part of Scotland to receive TV from Scotland. Their BBC “branch office” was Belfast, with Ulster Television supplying the commercial part.

Ending on a positive, it is thanks to the Scottish Government the railway to Stranraer remains open – come down, readers, and enjoy a trip. Just bring some bio disposable wipes and a wad of notes for the unfair fares!

Bryan Clark
Maybole

DID any other National readers see any freaky lights in the sky on Monday night? Was somebody in Edinburgh having a Halloween light show? Was the airport doing something? Were there meteor showers? Was there a kind of lightening or the Northern Lights? I was driving eastwards back towards Edinburgh from Polmont along the M8 (joining at junction 4) at around 7.15pm when I saw some freaky lights in the sky. It lasted about 20 minutes of my journey. It was dry but cloudy until reaching the outskirts of Edinburgh, where the sky cleared.

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The lights were coming out of the clouds towards me (ie, they were coming from the east and heading in a west direction). They were not bright, dulled by passing through cloud. They were of two types: moving and stationary. The moving ones were like wide, flat, horizontal sheets of light which flashed across the sky, several at once, in all directions, high in the sky above and lasting less than a second. The stationary ones were brighter circles, two below, then an arc of about nine above them. They too only lasted about a second before disappearing, but then would reappear on at least three occasions during the next 20 minutes. They were not coloured, so I discounted them as the Northern Lights. Could the wide flashes have been meteor showers? But what about the stationary circles? Could they have been some kind of weird atmospheric refraction of the lights at the Newbury roundabout ahead of me caused by the low cloud cover? Did anybody else see anything?

Certainly made for the Halloween atmosphere and an auspicious start to COP26!

Mairianna Clyde
Edinburgh