Our first full day in Scotland consisted, essentially, of three return trips from our Edinburgh base: two short suburban lines in the morning, to Newcraighall and North Berwick, followed by a return trip along the Highland Main Line from Edinburgh to Inverness via Perth.
0921 Edinburgh Waverley to Newcraighall, arr 0933
and
0947 Newcraighall to Edinburgh Waverley, arr 0957
Headcodes: 2G01 and 2K67 resp., operated by First Scotrail using Turbostar 170394
Distance: 4.75 miles; walk-up return: £2.30
We started with the short 12-minute trip to Newcraighall. Newcraighall was opened in 2002 as part of a project with the grand title of Edinburgh Crossrail, whereby trains from the suburban Fife Circle lines run through to Newcraighall, on the south-east side of Edinburgh, instead of terminating in Edinburgh, thus freeing up platform capacity at Edinburgh Waverley.
No new track was required for the Edinburgh Crossrail, save for a new siding at Newcraighall for turning back trains, since the lines were already used for freight trains via Millerhill yard. The line is a short and relatively bland suburban line; we'd ended up starting with this in order for the rest of our plan to work. We started from Edinburgh platform 1, went to Newcraighall, spent ten minutes sat in the platform, went straight back to Edinburgh, and arrived back at... platform 1.
That said, the line is due to be extended by a whopping 35 miles to Galashiels, reopening part of one of the most contentious of the Beeching closures, the Waverley Line between Edinburgh and Carlisle via Galashiels. This closure essentially left the Scottish Borders with no rail lines between Lockerbie and Berwick, and the re-opening has been campaigned for pretty much since the day and hour the line was closed. Construction is due to start this year, with a projected re-opening set for 2014.
Until then, however, the line is a short 5-mile stub, and we returned to Edinburgh less than 40 minutes after we left it. We jumped straight on the other suburban line on the east side of Edinburgh, that out to North Berwick:
1012 Edinburgh Waverley to North Berwick, arr 1045
and
1050 North Berwick to Edinburgh Waverley, arr 1123
Headcodes: 2Y18 and 2Y17 resp., operated by First Scotrail using Desiro 380104
Distance: 22.25 miles; walk-up return: £4.05
The North Berwick branch has been the problem child of Edinburgh's railway network for many years. Trains to North Berwick run along the East Coast Main Line as far as Drem, 18 miles outside Edinburgh, before turning onto a five mile long single-track branch line out to North Berwick. These provide the only stopping services to Musselburgh and a number of other suburbs of Edinburgh, and the line was electrified as part of the ECML electrification in the early 1990s.
However, as a suburban line tacked on to a long-distance electrification project, there was no natural candidate for stock to run the suburban services, and the lines have ended up, over the years, with hand-me-downs from almost every other line in the country. Over the year since electrification, they have been served by class 305 slam-door stock, by old mark 3 coaches from Virgin Trains with class 90 locomotives, by Class 170 Turbostars (diesel trains under an entirely electrified route!) eventually used by Hull Trains, and by Class 322s.
At long last, however, someone has had the sense to tack an extra few trains onto another order, and so the North Berwick line is going to be served by brand new Class 380 Desiros built by Siemens. The first of these was delivered just a month ago, and we got lucky with one out to North Berwick on this occasion. That said, a number of the other North Berwick services had to be cancelled, due to a class 322 having broken down; we saw it receiving attention from the fitters in the usual platform for North Berwick services (platform 4) at Edinburgh Waverley.
The line is actually quite a nice, scenic run out to the coast at North Berwick, and the new Class 380s are pretty nippy, with very good acceleration and braking. The run takes just over half an hour; we spent just five minutes in the platform at North Berwick before coming back to Edinburgh.
Satisfied with our two short suburban jaunts as toes-in-the-water, we plunged in head-first and headed on a 350-mile round trip to Inverness, via Perth:
1135 Edinburgh Waverley to Inverness, arr 1506
Headcode: 1H11, operated by First Scotrail using Turbostar 170412
Distance: 175 miles; walk-up return: £34.80
The line from Edinburgh to Inverness is a beautiful route through what is really quite mountainous territory: we essentially pass through the only north-south route across the Cairngorms. The fast-flowing rivers (often nearly torrential) which we run parallel to for much of the route only add to the beauty of the rolling mountains.
We headed out of Edinburgh to the north, over the Forth Rail Bridge in glorious sunshine. The view from the bridge is really quite impressive: you can see right across the Firth of Forth, with Edinburgh city in one direction and the Forth Road Bridge in the other. We then hugged the coast along to Kirkcaldy, and got some very good views back to the bridges from further down the Firth of Forth.
The route is double-track as far as Ladybank, where the lines to Dundee and Perth split; the Ladybank-Perth line is single-track. North of Perth, aside from a 23-mile stretch of double track between Blair Atholl and Dalwhinnie, the whole 118-mile line to Inverness is single track, albeit with reasonably frequent passing loops. Twice we were delayed by a minute or two waiting for trains to clear the single line, once at Ladybank and once at Dalwhinnie. Nonetheless, we only ran a few minutes late to Inverness.
That said, once you're north of Perth it's pretty obvious why it's largely single-track. The line is pretty twisty, running parallel to the A9 almost the entire way, twisting and turning parallel first to the River Tay, then to its tributary the River Tummel, before leading to a fifteen-mile slow climb up Glen Garry. This brings us to the summit: Druimuachdar (or Drumochter) is the highest point on the whole British railway network, at 1484 feet (452m) above sea level.
We fall slowly back, before climbing once more to Slochd summit at a mere 1315 feet (401m) above sea level, and then gradually descending back to sea level at Inverness. The climbs and descents do not go unnoticed: while climbing the trains invariably run at full power, not getting any faster (and sometimes even slowing!), but while descending we can simply coast and still sometimes pick up speed.
The line between Perth and Inverness is served usually only once every two hours, with services usually alternating between Edinburgh and Inverness. The long single-track sections, however, constrain the timetable and mean the service pattern is somewhat irregular; nonetheless, on this relatively sunny summer Saturday, the train from Edinburgh to Inverness was pretty full.
We were lucky to get a table of four seats to ourselves most of the way, and there was a noticeable lack of luggage space, with the overhead racks full to (almost) overflowing with bags that would have been better suited to the luggage spaces at the end of the carriages, if they had not themselves been full. Nonetheless, the linespeed isn't that high, with a top speed of around 75mph even along the coast of the Firth of Forth, so the three-car Turbostar was relatively adequate for the journey.
The weather held up nicely for most of the journey, with some sunshine all the way north as far as Aviemore. From thereon in, however, the rain descended and stayed with us all the way to Inverness. Matt, being an optimist from London (and not an optimist in the sense of Harold Wilson), had come to Scotland without a waterproof, so on arrival at Inverness we promptly found an outdoors shop and, much to the laughter of the shop assistants, bought a waterproof.
Inverness itself is a rather nice little city, although it was only granted city status in 2000 as a "millennium city". The city itself is home to only around 56,000 people, but as it is by far the largest settlement for nearly a hundred miles, the city is better-equipped with large shops than many larger cities in England. We took a wander round, first down to the full and fast-flowing River Ness, before heading up to the castle, now in use as the council buildings and the Sheriff Court.
We returned to Inverness station to head back to Edinburgh on the same route:
1653 (actual 1710) Inverness to Edinburgh Waverley, arr 2029 (actual 2040)
Headcode: 1B34, operated by First Scotrail using Turbostar 170424
Distance: booked 175 miles, actual 188.75 miles; walk-up return included above
The trains out of Inverness are busy enough that a queue started to form a full 20 minutes before departure time, which we duly joined, and boarded our train. The departure time of 16:53 came and went, and the guard soon told us that the train had failed and we were awaiting fitters to come over from the depot to fix the train. Inverness depot being nearby, the fitters soon came, and before long the guard came over the tannoy again and announced that our train (170455) was a failure.
Fortunately, with Inverness depot being nearby, they soon had a spare train (170424) in the platform, and we piled into that and found seats; we left just 17 minutes late, which actually isn't too bad for a failed train, especially somewhere as remote as Inverness.
What's more, we hit a stroke of luck: the Highland Chieftain (the once-daily service from London King's Cross to Inverness, which takes eight hours end-to-end), which we were due to pass in the loop at Pitlochry, was also running about 15 minutes late, and so rather than having to wait for it at some point we ended up both waiting very little time in Pitlochry, as intended!
However, the journey was not quite plain sailing. Not long into the journey the guard came down the carriage asking if there were any passengers for Fife (we were booked to call at Markinch and Kirkcaldy). This piqued our curiosity, and a quick check on National Rail Enquiries on our phone showed that there were "signalling problems in the North Queensferry area", which we conjectured meant there were problems on the Forth Bridge. The logical conclusion to draw, thus, was that, given the problems on the Forth Bridge, we were being diverted via Stirling, the only other logical route to Edinburgh, and thus not calling at Markinch and Kirkcaldy.
Given we were running (by now) 13 minutes late, the five-minute connection at Perth to the next train to Glasgow would be missed. In a rare example of joined-up thinking on the part of Scotrail, after Perth our train, which we had initially expected to be diverted through Stirling non-stop, did in fact stop at Stirling, and we were signalled through ahead of the stopping train from Alloa to Glasgow.
This allowed passengers for Glasgow to change at Stirling and get to Glasgow just 20 minutes later than the Perth connection would have allowed, instead of the hour-long wait at Perth they would have had otherwise. Indeed, Stirling signalbox was kind enough to re-platform the Glasgow train to the adjacent platform 6, rather than forcing passengers to cross the footbridge to platform 9 as timetabled.
(It was quite satisfying that, after the guard had asked for passengers to Fife, we were able to figure out what was going on, advise our fellow passengers heading for Glasgow of the problems, and having done so asked the conductor "are we being diverted via Stirling?" and got the unequivocal response "yes".)
We arrived in Edinburgh just 11 minutes late, in spite of the diversion being nearly 14 miles longer. We were aided not just by getting a clear run almost all the way to Edinburgh by the signallers, but we also benefitted from the linespeed via Stirling being higher than the booked route via Kirkcaldy; the diversion didn't really delay us at all, with the delay being almost entirely due to the breakdown at Inverness.
Scotrail showed the kind of joined-up thinking that is sadly lacking on the rest of the network: trains diverted rather than cancelled outright, and not just holding booked connections but adding stops to make up for lost connections. There were a number of passengers on our train heading for Glasgow, and it was clear that the guard's (and, indeed, Scotrail's) priority was not merely ensuring that the train was simply on time but that all the passengers got where they needed to go, an attitude sadly lacking on much of our railway network.
Well done, Scotrail, but also well done to Network Rail's Scotland Route: Scotrail run the trains, but Network Rail man the signalboxes and run the tracks, so recovering from disruption requires close co-operation between track and train, something made much, much harder by the fragmentation introduced into the network by the Byzantine method of privatisation opted for by John Major's government in 1993, which seemingly amounted to throwing all the various bits of the railway network in the air, seeing where they landed, and hoping for the best.
The McNulty report, published recently with a view to getting better value-for-money from the railway network, has recommended "vertical integration", where train operating companies take over the tracks they're running on and manage both track and train. Scotland is a perfect example of where vertical integration makes sense: almost all the trains in Scotland are run by Scotrail, with only a few trains run by Virgin Trains, East Coast and CrossCountry.
Indeed, on today's evidence, it seems that vertical integration is already working in practice (if not in theory): both with the train breakdown at Inverness and the diversion via Stirling required train operators to work together with Network Rail, something which can go spectacularly wrong at times south of the border.
That said, while vertical integration is a good idea in areas where one operator dominates the vast majority of the trains - Scotland and southern England being two good examples - in much of the midlands and the north of England there are far too many operators (not least freight operators) sharing tracks for vertical integration to work, and it seems to me that the only way to ensure vertical integration in all areas is to simply reunify the network into one company. We could even call it British Rail.
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Saturday was a really exciting day on trains, with not just beautiful scenery but interesting diversions (well, most people wouldn't think they're interesting but we enjoyed it no end!). Our statistics for the day:
Total time spent on trains: 8 hours, 35 minutes.
Distance travelled: 417.75 miles.
Walk-up price: £41.15.
We grabbed some dinner in Burger King in Edinburgh Waverley station, and headed back to the hotel for a relaxing night, before a day of tourism in Edinburgh on Sunday.
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