A Circle Line could resolve tram issue - your views

A Circle Line could resolve tram issue

The inquiry into why the partial restoration of Edinburgh's tram system went way over budget and took too long is now itself over budget and taking too long. It sounds like a bad joke.

Let's get the daft sequence right - Edinburgh had a perfectly good tram system, as did Leith. These tracks were then ripped up or covered over. The route to Leith was then dug up for a new tramline, but this was stopped and covered over again. It is then being dug over again to restore a tram service, we hope.

All the while, a perfectly good and fully functioning railway, the Edinburgh Suburban and Southside line, has been running across the south of the city but with only freight trains, although it could serve 12 stations in places such as Newington and Morningside Road.

A Circle Line could be reborn in months for perhaps a tenth of the price of the tram system.

Having spent a couple of years travelling the entire Scottish network for my book out next week - Scotland from the Rails: A Window Gazer's Guide - I am normally full of praise for Scotland's can-do attitude to railway reopenings, such as the brilliant Borders Railway, or bold, efficiently managed electrification (such as all the lines between Edinburgh and Glasgow).

But not in Edinburgh itself. Surely heads should have been banged together earlier than this. Couldn't, for example, Fife Circle trains run round the Edinburgh Suburban and Southside line and back across the Forth Bridge? Or could a fast tram-train run along it connecting to the city centre and the airport?

Whatever is decided, don't spend tens of millions of pounds just on consultants and then maybe £25 million and five years on each station.

I recall when a station was needed in an emergency in Cumbria, after a road bridge was swept away by floods, a station was put up for £40,000 in two weeks! Different circumstances, but let's have a bit more can-do in Edinburgh!

Benedict le Vay, Emsworth, Hampshire.

Salmond Inquiry is becoming a farce

The Salmond Inquiry has now reached the proportions of farce.

Shadowy ‘parliamentary authorities’ can prevent Alex Salmond from presenting in print his submission which has already gone to another inquiry and which has already been disseminated in the public domain - without, to my knowledge, anyone being prosecuted.

The question, therefore, is on what grounds could Mr Salmond be prosecuted for presenting a document that is already public knowledge? Even to the casual viewer, this must look extraordinary.

There may or may not have been a conspiracy to stitch up Alex Salmond with a criminal trial, but it certainly now looks as if there is a conspiracy, at the highest levels of the SNP administration, political and civil, to prevent mere members of the public from learning the truth about a matter that is costing them hundreds of thousands of pounds, if not millions.

Time for a judge-led enquiry with the full panoply of legal process and legal sanctions against those who lie or prevaricate.

Jill Stephenson, Glenlockhart Valley, Edinburgh.

Why don’t they want us to know?

A long list of shenanigans over who is or isn't appearing before the Holyrood Salmond Inquiry; who is or isn't telling the truth; what legal procedures are or are not in place.

You do, however, get the impression that the public was never meant to see the truth of all this, leading to the obvious question - why?

William Ballantine, Dean Road, Bo'ness.