Green light needed for track upgrades as main line struggles to cope with traffic

David Spaven has given us a comprehensive account of the near-paralysis which has been affecting the promised improvements to the largely single-track Highland Main Line from Perth to Inverness (“Government on the wrong track with insufficient upgrading of HML”, 26 July).

Progressing the modernisation of this route has been taking far too long. It was named as the third transport priority in 2008 after the A90 Queensferry Crossing and the Edinburgh to Glasgow electrification scheme (EGIP).

As Mr Spaven says, a budg- et of several hundred million pounds was envisaged to include major capacity improvements by doubling the tracks in many places. The regulator offered access to £90 million to start this process to Transport Scotland as long ago as 2009 but this was deferred for a year as TS was not ready. Many years, including five years of the latest funding period, have gone by with only now a much smaller scheme to modernise two passing loops at Aviemore and Pitlochry agreed.

Self-congratulations have even been advanced for “saving” money because the current scheme is so much more restricted, completely ignoring the fact that the timetablers are really struggling to fit in the welcome increase in the number of passenger trains and targeted journey time improvements because of the chronic lack of capacity on the line. Freight and charter trains are having to fight their corner hard.

I wonder if all this delay has been driving away freight traffic? A new area distribution depot for the Co-op near Inverness Dalcross Airport and the railway line to Aberdeen is about to open. Sadly (and poignantly after the complete destruction by fire of a Co-op lorry on the A9 near Inverness ten days ago) there is no word of using rail freight between Newhouse and Dalcross. Newhouse is close to the Mossend rail terminal and Mode Shift Revenue Support grants are available to help. Safeway and now Tesco have led the way on this modal shift of grocery traffic to rail, but the Co-op has decided to use double-decker road vehicles instead.

Putting off work to transform the capacity of this vital strategic railway will only serve to increase the dominance of the A9 road. This goes against Scottish Government environmental policy, climate change policy, modal shift policy, and sustainable transport policy.

The “new” high-speed trains will give passengers a more comfortable ride, but they will only be reliably faster if the single-track capacity constraints on the line are eased to put an end to the frustrations of waiting in a loop for a late-running train coming the opposite way. To properly serve the many needs of both passengers and freight, the government needs to rediscover their 2008 priority now.

R J ARDERN Drumdevan Road, Inverness

I am not surprised that Richard Allison complains about Edinburgh Waverley Station access (Letters, 27 July).

But he is wrong to limit his criticism to Edinburgh having “one of the worst arrival experiences into a capital city anywhere in the UK”. It’s actually the worst anywhere. If there is a more impossible railway station anywhere on earth, I have yet to see it.

ALLAN MCLEAN Mountcastle Bank, Edinburgh