News: Government scraps Edinburgh Airport underground rail link plans
Flights > News > # 1493 (28/09/2007)
Ambitious plans for an underground rail station at Edinburgh Airport have been scrapped.
The Scottish Government said the Ł650m Edinburgh Airport Rail Link, known as EARL, would be too expensive and that the money could be better spent elsewhere.
Proposals for a new airport ‘parkway’ station on the Edinburgh-Fife line and a new loop on the Edinburgh-Glasgow line were instead outlined. Transport Minister Stewart Stevenson said the scheme would achieve intended goals more quickly and at a third of the original price.
Mr Stevenson told the Scottish Parliament there was no way for the EARL project to proceed and said the new plans set out an "ambitious, credible and deliverable alternative".
The plan includes an airport station at Gogar on the Fife railway line, to allow easy access to the airport. Mr Stevenson said the government also intended to build a rail link between the Fife and Edinburgh - Glasgow routes, known as the "Dalmeny chord", allowing trains from Scotland's two largest cities to stop at the new airport station.
The savings from EARL, said the minister, would be invested in improving rail services, including a planned electrified rail network between Edinburgh and Glasgow and routes up to Dunblane, Alloa and Cumbernauld.
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We are glad to see the Scottish Parliament voting for some common sense cost controls over the Edinburgh airport rail link, even though they never managed to do this when constructing their own little talking shop!
Of course, passengers should be encouraged to travel to and from airports by train as much as possible, but however well-meaning this might be as an objective, no public transport project should ever be given a blank cheque, especially when this money could be so much more effectively spent elsewhere.
Edinburgh airport already has a very high modal split for passengers transferring between their flights and public transport services - in fact, Edinburgh boasts a higher public transport usage rate than Birmingham airport, even though the latter has its own station on site. The problem for politicians is that the vast majority of people using public transport to get to any Scottish airport are doing so by bus, and this just isn't as "sexy" as a fixed rail link. Much as though a fixed rail link would certainly make the journey to and from the airport more comfortable, we would suspect that, as has already been the case with the (prohibitively expensive) Heathrow Express, it would end up transferring far more people from existing bus services onto the train, than it would do to actually encourage new public transport users.
Encouraging a direct link between Glasgow and Edinburgh airport also sounds like a reasonable idea in principle, but if this is not as commercially viable as a bus service, why bother spending a small fortune on providing such a rail link?
These latest proposals for Edinburgh airport's public transport access might not seem particularly exciting, but they offer a perfectly viable alternative at a cost which won’t break the bank.
