HAVING an interest in politics makes you a geek. I embrace my geekery with pride, and when I’m not banging my head off the increasingly insane brick wall of British politics, I indulge myself in another geeky passion – trains, trams and light rail. It’s an escape from the craziness, and this week Westminster has given us plenty of craziness to seek escape from.
In my back room I possess a model tramway layout, which I constructed with my own not too fair hand. It’s not straightforward to build a model tramway. You can’t just purchase a tramway set from your local model railway retailer; it involves a lot of specialised work and home construction. It’s the same with models of Glasgow tenements. There are no kits for them, they have to be made by hand, from scratch. I launched into the project without much prior experience, and after several false starts ended up with a tramway layout that was half the size of the original plan but which cost twice the projected price. So now I know what it feels like to be Edinburgh.
My back room tramway runs model Glasgow trams. That’s possibly the closest that we’ll get to seeing trams run again in Scotland’s largest city, a city which once possessed the largest tramway network in the British Isles, yet which now suffers from woeful public transport.
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While we’ve all been distracted by the train crashes at Westminster, this has also been a very bad week for Scottish transport. Buried away in the back pages while Theresa May’s galactobourach dominated the headlines was the news that Glasgow City Council has authorised a building development on the old College Good Yards off High Street. This land has lain derelict for decades, but had been earmarked for the proposed Glasgow Crossrail link.
Glasgow Crossrail is a plan to rehabilitate and electrify the City Union line running from the South Side through Glasgow Cross to the North Clyde line between High Street and Belgrove. The City Union line is currently used only for freight and for stock movements of empty passenger trains.
If opened, Glasgow Crossrail would permit trains from the north and east of Scotland to run straight through the city centre to the south and west of the city. It would provide Glasgow with its first north-south railway link, and would greatly increase the usefulness and attractiveness of rail travel to commuters in the city, potentially allowing access from the north and east of Scotland to Glasgow airport. Crossrail would make that other stalled railway project, the Glasgow airport rail link, feasible. However despite numerous proposals and false starts, Glasgow Crossrail has languished in development limbo.
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An important part of the plan foresees a new rail chord linking the City Union line with westbound services on the North Clyde line, allowing trains to run directly from the south and south-west of Glasgow into Queen Street Low Level. With Glasgow Council’s decision this week to allow property development on the College Good Yards site, this part of Glasgow Crossrail is effectively dead. It is still possible for Crossrail to go ahead, but any new plan will not now include a direct link to Queen Street Low Level, making the entire project less attractive.
Glasgow’s railway transport is characterised by short-termism and short-sightedness. Just to the east of the proposed site of Crossrail there’s a massive football stadium within easy reach of a railway line, yet plans to reopen the old Parkhead North station were turned down.
Another piece of bad news for transport in Scotland came with the announcement this week that the Gemini Rail Services plant in Springburn is threatened with closure. The plant is the site where ScotRail trains are serviced and repaired and if the closure goes ahead, Scottish trains will have to be transferred to plants in England. Some 180 jobs could be lost in Glasgow. The historic tradition of train building and repair in Glasgow, at a site which was once the largest train manufacturing site in the world, would be no more.
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While Scotland’s railway transport languishes, massive investment is taking place in rail transport in London. This week the UK Government announced a further £2 billion investment in London Crossrail – extra funding which is required due to problems with the delayed project’s new signalling system. And buried away in the Chancellor’s autumn Budget was an investment of £291 million for the London Docklands Light Railway. The extra cash will permit the extension of the DLR to Thamesmead.
London’s public transport sees large chunks of public money being chucked at it. Everywhere else in the UK is stuck on the slow line. The chronic underinvestment in public transport infrastructure is compounded by the model of public transport imposed on the UK by the Conservatives with their privatisation fetish, a model which sees different modes of public transport competing with one another instead of working together in an integrated system. The result is expensive public transport, poor public services, and local authorities which don’t dare to dream because there is no cash and which sacrifice the longer-term vision of public transport in favour of the quick fix of property development.
Glasgow, a city with a historically low level of car ownership, is crying out for an integrated system of trains, buses and tramways. I still hope that one day trams might return to the streets of Glasgow, but given the funding models and constraints imposed by successive UK governments and passed on to the Scottish Government, I’m not holding my breath.
For the forseeable future the best light rail in Glasgow is going to continue to be the model tramway in my back room.
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