Borders Railway
The Borders Railway connects the city of Edinburgh with Galashiels and Tweedbank in the Scottish Borders. The railway follows most of the alignment of the northern part of the Waverley Route, a former double-track line in southern Scotland and northern England that ran between Edinburgh and Carlisle. That line was controversially closed in 1969, as part of the Beeching cuts, leaving the Borders region without any access to the National Rail network. Following the closure, a campaign to revive the Waverley Route emerged. Discussion on reopening the northern part of the line came to a head during the early 2000s. Following deliberations in the Scottish Parliament, the Waverley Railway Act 2006 received royal assent in June 2006. The project was renamed the "Borders Railway" in August 2008, and building works began in November 2012. Passenger service on the line began on 6 September 2015, whilst an official opening by Queen Elizabeth II took place on 9 September.
The railway was rebuilt as a non-electrified, largely single-track line. Several surviving Waverley Route structures, including viaducts and tunnels, were rehabilitated and reused for the reopened railway. Passenger services run half-hourly on weekdays until 20:00, and hourly until 23:54 and on Sundays. The timetable also allows charter train promoters to run special excursion services, and for the weeks following the line opening scheduled steam trains were run.
Background
Closure of the Waverley Route
In 1849, the North British Railway opened a line from Edinburgh through Midlothian as far as Hawick in the Scottish Borders; a further extension in 1862 brought the line to Carlisle in England. The line, known as the Waverley Route after the novels of the same name by Sir Walter Scott whose stories were set in the surrounding countryside, was controversially closed in January 1969 following the recommendation for its closure in the 1963 Beeching Report as an unremunerative line. According to information released by the Ministry of Transport, the potential savings to British Railways from the line's closure were at least £536,000. In addition, an estimated grant of £700,000 would have been required to maintain a full service on the line. The last passenger train over the Waverley Route was the Edinburgh- sleeper on 5 January 1969 worked by Class 45 D60 Lytham St Anne's which arrived two hours late into Carlisle due to anti-closure protesters blocking the line.Campaign to revive Borders rail
In 1992, Borders architect Simon Longland conducted a motorbike survey of the route which led him to set up the company Borders Transport Futures to evaluate the possibility of reopening. Having carried out feasibility work, in 1997 the company came close to lodging Parliamentary plans for what would effectively be a long siding for timber traffic from the West Coast Main Line at Gretna to and where the line would branch off along the former Border Counties Railway to Kielder Forest. This scheme, known as the South Borders Railway, was one of two projects promoted by BTF, the other being the North Borders Railway - a commuter line from Edinburgh to Galashiels. There were no plans to link the two lines. The South Borders Railway ran into difficulties as a result of the unwillingness of landowners to sell land.Based on the BTF's groundwork, the Campaign for Borders Rail, founded in 1999, was able to advance a project to reopen a section between Galashiels and Tweedbank to passengers. The first moves came in 1999 when the Scottish Parliament supported a motion by Christine Grahame MSP which called for the reinstatement of the line as a means of reversing the economic decline of the Borders region. This was followed by a £400,000 feasibility study conducted by Scott Wilson and commissioned by the Scottish Office which reported in February 2000 that there were "no insurmountable planning or environmental constraints" to reinstatement as much of the original line could be reused, although several major obstacles would need to be overcome which would entail substantial costs.
A number of blockages were identified in the section between Edinburgh and Gorebridge. The first was the breach of the former line by the Edinburgh City Bypass which intersected the trackbed at a shallow angle resulting in more than of the alignment being buried. When the bypass was designed, local councils had requested that provision be made for the railway but they were overruled by the Department of Transport which insisted that the trackbed should be cut "on the level". Two further breaches were reported as a result of improvements to the A7 road between Eskbank and Gorebridge. A small housing estate had been built on the line in Gorebridge. Even more encroachments were found on the line south of Tweedbank which would take infrastructure costs over £100 million. The Scott Wilson report also indicated that patronage projections for a new line were not encouraging, with none of the route options examined producing a positive cost-benefit value. The option which came closest to a neutral cost-benefit assessment was a reopening only as far as Gorebridge. Nevertheless, Scott Wilson did indicate that the reopening of the line would benefit the Borders region by providing better links with Edinburgh and creating up to 900 new jobs. Scott Wilson also suggested that part of the Border Counties Railway as far as Kielder Forest could be reinstated at a cost of £26 million to allow timber traffic to be carried on the southern part of the new Borders line. Furthermore, line speeds of 70–90 mph could be achieved on a single line, resulting in a journey time from the Borders to Edinburgh of 45 minutes compared to 55 minutes by car.
Despite the recommendations in the Scott Wilson report, political pressure on the Scottish Government to reconnect the Borders region eventually resulted in it giving support to the extension of the Edinburgh commuter network by as far as the Galashiels area.
Pressure came in particular from the Campaign for Borders Rail on behalf of which Petra Biberbach in February 2000 presented a petition with 17,261 signatures to the Public Petitions Committee of the Scottish Parliament. The petition received the unanimous support of the Parliament's Rural Affairs Committee which submitted it to the Parliamentary Chamber for debate. At its debate on 1 June, the Parliament passed unopposed motion SIM-922 according to which it "recognises and endorses the case for establishment of a railway linking the Scottish Borders to the national network at Edinburgh and Carlisle and urges the Scottish Executive to consult with the Strategic Rail Authority and others to facilitate its establishment". The Scottish Borders Council, Midlothian Council, City of Edinburgh Council, Scottish Enterprise Borders, Borders Transport Futures, Railtrack and ScotRail bid for £1.9 million from the Scottish Executive's Public Transport Fund to allow a Parliamentary Order for reopening as far as Tweedbank to be taken forward. Once funding had been obtained, the three local authorities created the Waverley Railway Joint Committee to promote the scheme; consultant Turner & Townsend was appointed to carry out the necessary studies for a Transport and Works Act application.
Edinburgh Crossrail
While the proposed Borders Railway was undergoing a lengthy period of consultation, passenger services were reintroduced on the surviving freight-only section of the Waverley Route between Portobello Junction and Millerhill. Brunstane and Newcraighall stations opened on 3 June 2002, the latter being from Edinburgh, providing a park-and-ride service to the city. The scheme cost £10 million to build two basic stations and upgrade of track for frequent passenger services. According to ScotRail, it was the first "proper heavy rail reopening" with stations since privatisation and the first permanent service to stations in the east of Edinburgh since,, Portobello and closed in September 1964. Plans for a station at Portobello were abandoned amid concerns that trains using it would hold up GNER services.A half-hourly service was launched using Class 158s running alternately to and Bathgate. This service, termed Edinburgh Crossrail, extended from Newcraighall through to Edinburgh Waverley, and continued either onto the North Clyde Line or the Fife Circle Line. The service from Newcraighall through to the North Clyde Line was later electrified as a byproduct of the Airdrie-Bathgate Rail Link, leaving that from Newcraighall to Dalmeny and through to the Fife Circle Line with diesel trains. Crossrail was a success, and provided forward momentum for the Borders Railway project.
Business case
The full business case for the line was published in mid-2004, showing a modest benefit to cost ratio of 1.01 to 1. The case was in some part built on projected housing developments – 700 in the Borders and 1,100 in Midlothian – that led to an anti-rail backlash in local elections with the success of the Borders Party. Representing the party, Councillor Nicholas Watson described the scheme as "a colossal waste of money" and called for the funds to be used instead on the Glasgow Airport Rail Link. The Campaign for Borders Rail indicated that the low ratio followed from the choice to build a single-track line for half-hourly commuter services with no capacity for freight or specials. A revised benefit-cost ratio of 1.32 was announced in March 2008 despite costs of construction having risen to between £235 million and £295 million.In February 2013, the final business case was released by the Scottish Government, which showed a benefit-cost ratio of just 0.5:1. This led the journal Local Transport Today to comment that the line was "one of the worst-performing major transport projects to be funded in recent times." The Campaign for Borders Rail responded stating that the ratio was based on modelling that underestimated the route's potential patronage, predicting only 23,431 yearly return trips from Galashiels equivalent to only 70 passengers a day or three per train, which would be less than the number using the existing bus service.