We lack ambition

Philip Haigh says: “The world is changing fast and the railway must adapt.” He says reopened railways should deliver ‘just enough’ rather than gold-plate the initial projects ( RAIL 918).

But the overwhelming lesson from recent history - most notably the ‘Waverley’ route - is vastly increased future costs to rectify a lack of ambition with the initial reopening scheme.

The Waverley was rebuilt largely as a single-track railway, with just enough capacity to deal with a basic semi-fast service.

But it was blindingly obvious that double-track would be needed throughout at the northern end, with an outer-urban turnback to make provision for an all-station Edinburgh stopper, separated from the long-distance trains.

Not doing this at the time has cramped the style of Galashiels trains ever since and caused terrible overcrowding at peak times.

Fixing it is not going to be cheap, and that’s just to deal with existing problems.

The railway should (I’m going to stick my neck out and say ‘will’) reopen through to Carlisle at some point in the 2020s. And that will require double-track south at least as far as Galashiels - to deal with freight, West and East Coast passenger diversions, Sleepers, urban traffic, and (at the very least) an hourly semi-fast Edinburgh-Carlisle service.

The only good news was that national policy dictated passive provision for overhead electrification. Gold-plating? Not a bit of it!

David Henshaw, Dorchester