Manchester Now! Is Glasgow Next?
Look at most large English, Scottish and Welsh cities and there is usually at least one line through the city so that trains can pass from one side of the city to the other. Look at these examples.
1. London is upgrading the main North-South Thameslink route and building another East-West one.
2. Birmingham, Cardiff, Edinburgh, Leeds, Newcastle, Nottingham, Reading and Sheffield all have lines that fan out on either side.
3. Liverpool Lime Street is effectively a terminus on the coast, but a North-South line in the city connects stations in the North with others in the South.
When lines connect across a city, this means you don’t have so many terminal platforms in the centre of that city. As an example look at Brighton and Bedford, which have been connected for decades by Thameslink through London. There are several Central London stations where the train calls, so passengers have a lot of journey options. But there are no terminal platforms in Central London used by Thameslink.
Only two major cities don’t have a connection like this.
1. Manchester has two unconnected stations; Piccadilly and Victoria, with the former generally dealing with Southern services and Victoria dealing with the North and East.
2. Glasgow is the same with Queen Street dealing with the North and East and Central dealing with the South and West.
But with the announcement today of the final go-ahead for the Ordsall Curve in Manchester, as reported in this piece on the BBC, Manchester is finally getting the cross-city link it should have got with the building of the Picc-Vic tunnel. This plan was abandoned in 1977.
Will Crossrail Glasgow be announced before the election? I doubt it, as Alex Salmond would label it an English bribe.
But it is desperately needed!
We’re Back To The West Lothian Question
A good leader always picks the issue, place and time for their battles to ensure that he or she wins in the end. Planning should be meticulous and hopefully it all works out as they want it.
Compare Margaret Thatcher and her government and military’s response to the invasion of the Falklands by Argentina with other campaigns fought in Iraq and Afghanistan recently. The Falklands was a smaller conflict, but very little was left to chance, although it could be thought of as a close run thing.
Other British Prime Ministers and influential politicians have brought contentious legislation through to law, by making sure they plan and win every battle. Take Cameron’s law on same-sex marriage as a recent example. But then there are many others.
So when Alex Salmond proposed a vote on Scottish independence, I thought if he got it right, he could win.
His mistake was that he didn’t plan and get decent concessions on tax and spending, before he even called for the poll. That way, if Devo max had been successful and acceptable to all parties, after a few years, Scotland would probably have had an agreed separation, in much the same way Slovakia separated from the Czech Republic.
But he pig-headedly called the referendum as early as he could.
And he lost. So we’ve now been kicked back to the West Lothian Question, but with more variables than it ever had before. Tam Dalyell must be laughing from his grave.
It has been suggested this morning that large cities have more powers, something that I agree with.
But Scotland now has the Glasgow Problem, as surely what is good for London, Manchester, Birmingham and Newcastle must be good enough for the one of the largest cities outside London in the UK.
Alex Salmond, who in a overly-passionate campaign led us to this mess, should resign!
September 6th 2015 – A Date For All Scots
According to this report in Global Rail News, Alex Salmond has just announced that the Borders Railway will open on this date.
Perhaps a bigger uncertainty than the opening date, is whether he will open this significant new railway in an independent Scotland?
How Would The Scottish Diaspora Vote On Independence?
I ask this question as the BBC has a story about five famous Scots, who live outside Scotland would vote.
I can’t find a poll of Scots outside Scotland asking how they would vote, but I can add an anecdote.
I used to play real tennis with an American, who was an academic at Cambridge. His research area was the relationship of the diaspora, with their original country. He had found that a lot of the troubles in the Indian sub-continent had been funded by donations from abroad. As a Bostonian, he did add that he didn’t think that the Irish in his home city, had helped find a solution in Northern Ireland.
I also think, that we all like places where we grew up or to which we have a strong connection, to do well and have control of their destiny.
For this reason, it could be that if Scots living outside Scotland had the vote, then the referendum would more likely be a vote for independence.
So could Alex Salmond have got it wrong, on not allowing Scots abroad to vote, if he wants the vote to go his way?
A Dilemma For Alex Salmond
I didn’t know that Scotland had a dark sky park and a gold tier one at that in the Galloway Forest Park.
It was funded by the Scottish government and as an amateur astronomer, who recently saw the wonderful skies in Sweden, I think that these dark sky reserves and parks are a very good idea.
But now Alex Salmond has a dilemma, as outlined by the BBC in this report. As a big supporter of wind turbines, does he give planning permissions for these around the park. As they are lit at night, they wouldn’t make the Scottish Dark Sky Observatory any better.
The Astronomer Royal for Scotland is not amused and has said this.
Installing any large structures that require illumination (whether visible or infra-red) would be akin to putting a factory in Glen Coe or electricity pylons along the Cuillin Ridge.
I have no direct interest as I live in London, but knowing the pleasure I get from observing the skies when I can, I think we need more dark sky parks. We also need one that is very easily accessible. Obviously, a road through such an area to an observatory would be a generator of light pollution, but surely there must be somewhere in the UK, where a train station is in a dark sky area, that could be used to take visitors in and out, without making too much light pollution.
The Anonymous Widower 