The ripple effect of major enhancements

As is often the case for major civil engineering projects, the connecting infrastructure ought to be more prominent in people’s minds.

Nearly 45 miles of connecting railway had to be constructed or heavily modified to enable utilisation of the new link. And despite the Forth Bridge itself formally opening on March 4 1890, full operation was only enabled once these lines were completed three months later.

This was due in no small part to the Forth Bridge Railway Committee being unconvinced of the need for additional high-quality, two-track railway (as can be seen by the original drawings with only very short spurs connecting onto existing branch lines) - until the engineers convinced it otherwise.

Nor was the opening of the new and upgraded railways in Fife and Lothian the end of the story. From here, the parallels to our generation’s major railway enhancements become ever clearer.

Following the massive upsurge in traffic, the old Waverley railway station and its two-track approaches were exposed as woefully inadequate for the task of platforming and marshalling the increased number of trains. A further upgrade was needed.

It was only in 1900 that the hugely complex infrastructure work through Edinburgh was completed at a cost of £1.5 million (£180m in 2017 prices) - nearly half of the cost of the Forth Bridge itself.

This included four-tracking the line between Corstorphine in the east to Abbeyhill in the west, driving three new tunnels to parallel existing ones, increasing the number of platforms at Waverley to 19, totally rebuilding the station itself, and reconstructing North Bridge above it. Today, we find ourselves in exactly the same position, with infrastructure works elsewhere rippling back into central Edinburgh.

Owing to the significant growth of services in Scotland fuelled by Central Belt electrification, the reopening of the line into the Borders, and more trains on both north-south main lines, exactly the same problems are resurfacing. Waverley doesn’t have enough platforms, there isn’t enough through-capacity, and the lines at either side of the station are clogged. Thankfully, a major upgrade is once again in the pipeline.

Yet these effects still being ignored elsewhere in the country, at least by those funding rather than specifying infrastructure upgrades - for example, the Ordsall Chord in Manchester.

Looking forwards to High Speed 2, there is a high risk that the remodelled Crewe and Sheffield stations (two examples where the new line meets the current railway at-grade) will be inadequate to accommodate the traffic flows that high speed segregation can unlock on the existing network.