If you're a bloke of a certain age the sight of a steam train is the sort of thing that makes you glow as the wave of nostalgia washes over you. I arrived at Berwick-Upon-Tweed station this afternoon to catch the 16.43 National Express train to London and was greeted with this sight.
It's an A4 locomotive built in 1937 and today operates steam train 'specials' throughout the UK.
The furore over BA's failings with the new terminal 5 has inevitably given Alex Salmond the chance to complain that once again Scotland is being treated unfairly. He was on the BBC news last night wagging on about it and saying Scotland was fed up. He said passengers were getting "fed up". Andy Willox, of the Federation of Small Business Scotland, added his voice to the complaints: "It is an open secret that flights to and from Scotland are the first to be scrapped in order to clear the backlog and handle more lucrative international flights." So did Liz Cameron, chief executive of Scottish Chambers of Commerce: "It seems once again that services to and from Scotland are suffering disproportionately."
The simple fact is that flights to Glasgow and Edinburgh are amongst BA's most frequent services and from an airline point of view it is easier to cancel flights on routes where you operate a higher frequency. That way it's possible to combine loads onto other services. The first thing that airline schedulers do is to look at is the booked loads and then try and figure how to cause the minimum disruption - for both passengers and the airline. To suggest that this is some anti-Scottish thing is plain daft.
The First Minister used the opportunity to once again call for more direct flights from Scotland. "Filtering everything through Heathrow leaves us extremely vulnerable, we need more direct flights and of course we should have a fast train service north to south." It's as though he lives in an economic vacuum. No matter how much he wants an independent Scotland it will not automatically create demand for enough passengers to bring about a surge in direct services. Quite a few flights that have started up in the last three years with the Scottish governments route start up grants have ceased for lack of passengers. In the economic realities of aviation it's all about profit, not politics.
According to the BBC, Scottish Borders Council (SBC) has set up a new group under a local councillor to "tackle the shortage of affordable homes in the Scottish Borders.". The report says "average property prices were now running at eight times the average salary in the area. The proposed reopening of the Waverley Line has also driven up housing demand." It goes onto say that Eyemouth has seen some of the sharpest increases in the UK with prices rising 82% in three years.
Well Eyemouth is 48 miles and around an hour and twenty minutes away from the central Borders terminus of the Waverley Line, so the railway has little or no affect on prices. The fact is that house prices in many areas of the Borders are driven by four factors. The ease of commuting to Edinburgh (by road), the attractiveness of the lifestyle, coupled with prices, for people moving from the south of England in particular and the opportunity for people to buy second properties here in the Borders for holiday homes. Last, but by no means least, is the fact that the ripple effect from Edinburgh as people move out to get cheaper housing has driven prices at a faster rate, off the lower base price that Border's housing enjoyed (?) for many years.
According to the councillor in charge of the new group. "The average income has to be multiplied by eight times to allow somebody to buy a house round here given the average house prices. We are going to have a wide-ranging look at what other people in other parts of the country are doing. We're going to get examples of best practice and nothing is off the table, in coming back to council, so that we can get some fresh ideas and see what we can do to make a real difference to this major problem."
Well good luck, but unless the council take control of the supply of affordable rental housing then there's little hope of any change. Developers who are building new homes for sale have no imperative to supply affordable housing, whatever that means, and so in general bigger, more profitable housing is built.
As for the railway line boosting things it's even more doubtful that it is going to be built. Having said that nothing is slowing down the expenditure on the project by SBC, a burden on the taxpayer and a diversion from the real problem. Meanwhile the Scottish government is saying no more money can be allocated to the project. All this is against a background of everyone knowing that the budgeted figures are way too low. It is disingenuous of the council to be ploughing ever onwards, probably diverting money from other schemes across the Borders, to support the white elephant of a railway line that is unfit for purpose.
Apparently the Public Transport Agency of Roads and Transport Authority in Dubai recently began installation of air-conditioned bus stops. Perhaps if we had heated ones in Britain more people would take the bus in winter.
