 Good evening everybody and great big welcome to this the second summer lecture by the Royal Philosophical Society. I'm Trisha Porte, I'm one of the vice presidents of the institution. And tonight we have a talk on the new topic for the Royal Philosophical Society, the building of the Boarders Railway. It's not a topic we normally cover, but before I introduce our speaker, I'd just like to give you some details as to how we are organizing the meeting tonight. All being well, you will just hear two people speaking. That's myself who's chairing the meeting and our speaker, Hugh Ward. Now we have on the introductory slide, we did have a bit of information about putting forward questions, and that is using the small icon at the bottom of the screen, the Q and A icon. And that is where you should type in your question. Now, because when you're typing that obliterates part of the screen, we will have a short break after Hugh's talk, so that you can type without being distracted from the talk. Also, you will see at the bottom of the screen the chat icon. And if you do have any technical difficulties, if you type your concern in there, one of our council members may be able to help solve that for you. So now to our meeting this evening, the building of the Boarders Railway. And 49 kilometers long, this is the longest new domestic railway to have been built in Great Britain in the last 100 years. And our speaker tonight is Hugh Walk, a chartered civil engineer, whose whole career was spent in the rail industry. And he was the end of his career, he was the project director for the Boarders Railway for Network Rail, and he's going to tell us tonight about the building of this exciting and very successful project. Hugh. Well, thank you very much Trish. Good evening everyone and thank you for the chance to talk to you about the Boarders Railway. It is a little bit old hat now as the railway has been open for almost five years. However, I hope you enjoy this nonetheless. It's very much the story of the building of the railway, and it's partly a chronological story about how through time we built the railway, but it's also a journey down the line from north to south. As we did start the build at the north end of the route, albeit later on in the process of building the line we were working all along the line at various stages at the one time. However, no story about the Boarders Railway would be complete without looking back to the closure of the original line. So this is 6th of January, actually the 5th of January 1969. And the top picture show hoax station with the protesters out, including a coffin being sent to the Minister of Transport as they as they protested against the closure of the line. And that culminated in the lower picture with a fairly famous incident at Newcastleton level crossing where the villagers come out after midnight and stop the overnight sleeper train, the last train in the line and police reinforcements were called. And they had to call out the very young David Steele MP to try and placate the local villagers. Now the Waverley line was the main route between Edinburgh and Carlyle. It was a main through route. And in the 1950s, there was quite a significant network of lines, branch lines and the borders. But by the 1960s, most of these had been closed. And all that was left was the main line through the borders and the branch line to Lyon was still open at that stage. And unfortunately, because it was seen as a through route, it was very easy for Dr. Beeching when he came along to argue that the line could be closed and all the traffic could be diverted through car stairs to the west to see the way the trains go today. In fact, between Carlyle and Edinburgh. However, it did cause a lot of damage to Gala Shields and Hawick, and it left these two places further from a main line railway station than any similar size town in the UK, further from a railway station and it left the whole of the Scottish borders region without a station within its boundary. The track was lifted eventually after a kind of heroic preservation attempt to run it as a private line. And very quickly, there started to be building works in various parts of the line, particularly roadworks. There was various road schemes to use bits of the railway formation. And so things kind of carried on like that and things started to change around about the late 1990s. The campaign for Borders Rail had been arguing for the reinstatement of parts of the railway. And around about that time there was some major industrial closures in the borders and Scottish Borders Council along with Midlothian Council and Edinburgh City Council started looking at feasibilities to reopen sections of the line to spread the economic prosperity of the Edinburgh area down into the borders. They eventually put an act, Waverley Railway Scotland Act through the Scottish Parliament, which had a very pro rail agenda at that time. The act of Parliament was important because as well as giving the powers to build the railway. It gave the scheme outline planning permission and also importantly compulsory purchase powers over over the land because all the land now lay in private hands. The proposal that the act of Parliament suggested was opening the northern third of the line. So 30 miles from just outside Edinburgh, all the way down to Gala Shields and Tweed Bank. Now it was a very geographical railway. It climbs steeply all the way from Edinburgh, twisting and turning, diverting round by Tynehead to try and gain height up to Fowler Hill Summit, which is the highest point in the line. And then the railway follows the valley of the River Gala all the way down to Gala Shields where it joins the Tweed and it twists and turns crossing, crisscrossing the River Gala about 20 times or so and it's way down to Gala Shields and Tweed Bank. The new stations are shown in black and starting at the north end we have Shofair. Now Shofair is a brand new development area in the southeast of Edinburgh. Eventually there's going to be thousands and thousands of new homes there. And there was a desire to bring the railway through the Shofair area. So actually this northern section of the railway is in a brand new alignment. It's further west from the original alignment to bring the railway through the Shofair area and allow a station to be built there. But it also gave an easier crossing of the Edinburgh city bypass, which of course had been built in the intervening years and took no cognisance of the river being a railway here again. The next three stations at the north end of the line, S Bank, Newton Grange and Gore Bridge all had stations in the original line. And then the next station right down in the borders is at Stow. Now Stow originally was not to get a station. It was deemed to be too small, but the good people of Stow put up a strong fight with the parliamentarians at that time. And it was eventually agreed that they could have their station. Gala Shields is the main station in the line. And as you'll see later, there wasn't much room at Gala Shields to put a station. So it's the only station that doesn't actually have a car park. Tweed Bank at the south end of the line is the terminus. Now why stop the line at Tweed Bank? Especially as we're only a short distance from Melrose. The feasibility studies identified that this was really the optimum balance between cost and benefits. And Tweed Bank allowed space to build a large station with a large car park. And there's also excellent road connections to all the other major towns in the borders. In red here, you see some of the key construction challenges in the line. In the north, this is largely about roadworks and bridges. In the central area of the route, we've got Fallahill Summit where we had some major challenges in getting the interface between the A7, the railway and the local community at Fallahill. And then at Harriet and Fountain Hall, we had two of the level crossings on the original railway. And we don't like level crossings now in new railways. They are an inherent risk. And so there was fairly major roadworks required at Harriet and Fountain Hall to allow the railway to be, to allow the closure of level crossings. At the south end of the line, we have the two tunnels, Beauchanck Tunnel and Torwood Lee Tunnel, and we'll talk about them shortly. So seven new stations with car parking for six was designed to provide a 55 minute running time from Tweed Bank to Edinburgh Waverly. The idea is to have a half hour passenger service during the day. And indeed it is a very good train service. It starts very early in the morning and finishes very late at night. It's one of the last trains leaving Waverly at night. It's actually the one down to the borders. Diesel trains, but with passive provision for future electrification and a signalling system controlled from Edinburgh Waverly. In terms of scope, that meant 42 new bridges, 95 refurbished bridges, two tunnels, one and a half million tonnes of earthworks. I'll say a bit more about that. And of course all the track had to be laid, new drainage and fencing throughout the line. And interestingly for a new railway, some 10 kilometres of new roads associated with it. Now the first thing we had to deal with was mining remediation. Basically the area north of Gore Bridge up to the edge of the Edinburgh area was heavily undermined over the years. Not just like in this area, this is the area of the old Moncton Hall Colury, a fairly modern pit which had very deep shaft and deep seams. But a lot of the problems stemmed from ancient mine workings going back prior to the 18th century where there was very little record of them. And it left behind fractured and broken grounds, cavities and lots of mineshafts which weren't terribly well recorded, weren't recorded at all in some cases. At one stage we had all the drilling rigs in Scotland on site and it really was a major undertaking to try and tackle this mine working. Obviously running a passenger train service over areas of mine workings at up to 80 miles an hour, we couldn't risk any possibility of a train being derailed because of settlement. Now again at the north end of the line I mentioned the railway was diverted. Unfortunately when they decided to divert it, they actually diverted it through a big hill. So the very first thing we had to do was dig a huge cutting through the hill at the north end of the line, which is mostly natural material but there was also some colliery spoil on top as well. Luckily there was a lot of excavation throughout this section of the line and we did have space on some spare railway land in the area where we could spread and landscape all the excavated material. This is further along the same section of new railway line and hopefully you can see my cursor on the screen. This is the section of brand new railway getting built and some of these roads were the original roads in the area and this is some of the new roads we're having to construct. This is all tied into other roads that were taking, other road works taking place in the new Shoffair area. But one of the challenges we had this area here at the Cockatoo pub, this road here the A6106 actually passed along the line of the railway in this area and the road going off at the bottom right hand corner here was a new road linking over to the A7 and Midlothian, it was developed by Midlothian council and the idea is that this would replace this road that we were hoping to close. Unfortunately the last minute Midlothian announced that they couldn't actually, they didn't actually have the powers to close this section of road so we're left with no option but to rebuild it along to the west side of the new railway. And here you can see further along this is again the new railway getting built. This is the new A6106 that we had to build virtually at the last minute. We also had challenges with a major BT fibre optic cable going through the land in this area which was a fairly big challenge because some of these main fibre optic cables which feed the economy in the Edinburgh area take a long time to negotiate movement with BT. But further south in the railway even in the original sections of line there was major earthworks required. The railway over the years had been used as a dumping ground for spoil bits if it had been infilled or had collapsed over the years. And so we had major moving work, major civil engineering work throughout the northern section of the line and indeed over the whole line. One of the first big structural challenges we had was the Edinburgh city bypass. When the borders railway was, or the construction of it was announced in 2011 that we're actually starting work. There was headlines in the Edinburgh evening standard that the borders railway was going to cause traffic chaos in Edinburgh because we were going to close the Edinburgh city bypass. Well needless to say we're quite determined that that wouldn't happen and we decided to build a diversionary route for the road and you can see it's starting to take place here and the next few slides show the temporary road diversion taking place. And you see the traffic's now been diverted onto the new road and we've started excavating for a bridge. You can see the new sections of bridge being installed. This was all prefabricated concrete so it was a fairly quick job to do. We're starting to backfill now almost up to the surface. You can see the black top starting to go down and here is the finished bridge with the rails going through and the road pardon me has been diverted back onto its original alignment over the bridge. I have been asked in the past why didn't we just build a permanent realignment of the road and the simple answer is this land where we built the temporary diversion we only had powers to use that in a temporary basis. And we had to reinstate this and hand it back to the landowner which happened to be the Duke of Baclew. So we're pretty sure we did ask but there was no way that we were going to be able to get that land. The next big challenge was hard and green roundabout. Again a new section of the A7 had been built. This roundabout had been built in the intervening years. And the rail we used to cross right across the middle of where the roundabout is now. So we're left with no option but to build a bridge and we used these U shaped concrete beams. These came from Ireland and there are over 100 tonnes each if I recall correctly. Over 100 feet long and they came in these special transporters. Unfortunately in February 2014 when we were getting these beams installed there was a major weather event in the UK at that time if you can remember. All the ferries were disrupted and the police were busy with emergencies and it was touch and go whether we're going to get these beams on to site and time for the installation. However they arrived we had a fairly extensive road closure on the A7 to allow us to install the beams. And the next sequence shows some of the beams being installed. We had a 1000 tonne road mobile crane. I love this but this is just thunderbirds. Those of you who remember thunderbirds. So this is one of the largest road mobile cranes in the UK and it required various other cranes to put it together overnight in the Friday night. This crane is just the baby crane that does the building. So it's starting to get it together. That's the big crane. That's the 1000 tonne road mobile. Here's the beams coming in just after dawn in the Saturday morning. It takes a bit of organization and rigging to lift these into place. I always wish we could actually get people on site to work as fast as what you see in this time sequence but it never seems to happen that way. So that's two beams in. You can see the weather brightened up. We're actually very lucky with the weather throughout the build of the Borders Railway. We didn't have too many weather problems unlike some other projects that have been on. So in the Saturday night the final of the four beams were lifted in. Sunday we spent putting a deck on and over time the ends were filled in as well. And a few months later we had the first train, one of our track construction trains passing over the bridge. But further south from Hardwood Green we come to Newbattle Viaduct, a beautiful 23 arch masonry viaduct which dates from the opening of the line in the 1840s. And it was really in remarkably good condition. We're quite concerned about this structure. It really is one of the icons of the old Waverly line and the Borders Railway, but it was in remarkably good condition. And one of the reasons for that was that at some time in the past, possibly during the 1950s, a new concrete deck was installed with new up stands either side. And that protected the viaduct and stopped the water percolating the deck and into the into the spandrel walls and arches. Water's always the enemy of an engineer and if you can prevent water ingress then it does prevent a lot of damage. As we move south from the built up areas into Beyond Gore Bridge, this is what faced us, the railway had been returned to nature, farmers used various parts of the line. And the earthworks particularly around the Tinehead area were in very poor condition. The railway built in a fairly grand scale for its day. You can see the height of the cutting slope here, but they were in poor condition required a lot of remedial work. The whole area through Tinehead was very prone to slips and you can see the kind of extent of remediation required here. Now I should mention the environmental challenges at this point. Every project, every big project nowadays is required to have a code of construction practice. This lays down everything from community liaison, liaison, hours of working, control of pollutants including dust, waste, ecology importantly, all sorts of issues around site safety and lighting. And particularly in the ecological front, we had major challenges building this major piece of construction down through the beautiful borders countryside. And here you see some temporary badger sets being installed. We had over 100 badger sets to relocate and all this has to be done with permissions from Scottish natural heritage. And a lot of waiting to see how the badgers behave before we can actually go into what was formerly their land. Another big challenge was the River Gala itself. It was a special area of conservation as well as being a breeding ground for salmon. It contains river lamphrey, which are a protected species. And at this particular location, the river probably about 20 years or so ago decided to split and one half of the river moved over here and started eating away the railway embankment. Now, when we came to look at what we're going to do in this area, we thought we'd simply be able to cut off this diversion of the river, put it back into its main channel. But by this stage, this new section of river had developed its own, its own habitats, its own river habitats. And so we're left with no option but to leave it and to rebuild and strengthen the side of the railway line. We're now at the halfway point in the railway. This is Fala Hill. And we had various challenges at Fala Hill because the A7 crosses over the railway line. And it's at the same area where you can actually see terribly well, but in the background there's quite a number of houses here in the community at Fala Hill. And there was a lot of different options as to how the bridge over the railway and the road works and the railway works were going to impact the Fala Hill area. That resulted in us owning quite a lot of land at Fala Hill and all this land contained good rock, which we were able to basically quarry and use that for aggregates that we needed on the railway. Now that had the added benefit that it then created space for us to put all the stuff we couldn't use, all the stuff that wasn't suitable from an engineering point of view was placed in the void and eventually landscaped. One of the wags at Transport Scotland said they were changing the road signs to read Fala rather than Fala Hill because we had removed all the hill. This is it later on in the process. The road bridge is starting to take place. We've got a temporary diversion here of the road and this is the road in its final position over the bridge, which is hidden in the snow. You can see the railway, the rails are actually laid passing through here. This was the early part of 2015. Once the snow had melted, we finished this area here and landscaped it all and you wouldn't know that this whole area had been excavated, indeed, all this area. One of the funny things was when we came to finish this area off, we used hydro seeding to plant grass seed and it actually comes with a kind of green dye so that you can see the areas that you've spread it on. But there were stories in the local papers that Network Rail had painted the grass green for the Queen coming to open the line. As we move south down into the Valley of the Gala, we come across these bridges, Hogback, Gerder bridges, Rot-Iron bridges, not the original bridges in the line. A lot of the original under bridges were timber, but these date from the 1870s, 1880s and still in remarkably good condition. And what we did was we encapsulated them in these tents so we could blast off all the old lead-based paint, taking care that the paint didn't fall into the river below. And then carrying out steelwork repairs, we did have to replace some cross girders, carry out some steelwork repairs to the Rot-Iron. And this was the kind of finished product, painted up good for another 50 years or so. And that's a comparison with how it was. Down to Beauchamp Tunnel. And this is the south portal of Beauchamp Tunnel. And this isn't the original. This actually just dates from the 1950s. The tunnel was actually about 200 feet longer than this. And Beauchamp suffered a number of problems over the years while the railway was in use. And it got to the stage in the 1950s where there was some major distortion of the tunnel lining. And the problem was that the original tunnel had been blasted out of the rock, dug out of the rock and a lining installed. But lots of rock was falling down from the area above in the void, down onto the tunnel lining. And over the years, there was all sorts of bullhead rails. It was strapping inside the lining of the tunnel to support it. So in the 1950s, they went in and they put a new concrete saddle over the arch of the tunnel. Sorry about that. And packed it with stone, grouted it up. And so when we came to reinstate the tunnel, we weren't sure how much of this work had been done and how successful it had been. Now luckily, through taking cores and investigations, we found that actually they'd made quite a good job. We still had to do a lot of work in Boschank tunnel, but it was traditional railway tunnel work, some spray concrete linings, patch brickwork repairs, some stitching into the side of the tunnel in various places. And importantly, putting in this concrete slab track, which not only strengthens the base of the tunnel, but allows a lower track profile and allows us to get, in future, it gave us clearance for overhead wires without any other major work in the tunnel. And this is one of our engineering trains coming out to the south end of the tunnel. We then get come down to Torwood Lee tunnel, just north of Gala Shields. This is it in the top right hand picture. But right next to Torwood Lee and the countryside was this old bridge over the river. In fact, there's another, the River Gallag is rounding a loop and there's another demolished bridge in the other side of the tunnel as well. And this was one of my biggest concerns was how we were going to get in here with major construction plant to rebuild this bridge. And in fact, we did manage to get the crane through the tunnel and all the materials and we're able to get this new bridge in place, actually using a lot of the original piers from the old bridge. But it's a fairly remote corner of the countryside to work in. And so we come to Gala Shields itself. A Gala Shields being a built up area. Almost all the railway land had been taken over and the bridges demolished or removed. And it really was a tight squeeze trying to thread the railway back through Gala Shields. The original station had been taken over by an ASDA car park and a health center as well. Part of it. And so we're left with a very narrow corridor to push the railway past the edge of ASDA. We weren't rich enough to be able to buy ASDA out. This is one of the new bridges in Gala to replace one of the ones that was long gone. Now you'll notice some of the earlier bridges in the line were painted green. Those of you who know your border's rugby will know that green is the colours of white rugby football club. And there was no way that you were going to get green colours in Gala Shields. So the bridges in Gala Shields are painted a nice colour of Gala Maroon. The only bridges in the line to be treated that way. And so let's have a look at the stations. All the seven stations were built in skeleton form before the track was laid, mostly using precast units. Once the track was down, we installed the copes and the surfacing just to make sure all the levels and the alignment of the platforms matched the track. The stations are unmanned, but they are fairly sophisticated in terms of IT. All have platform display screens that can show where the trains are going to, the timings, how late they are. There are automated announcements, automatic ticket machines. There's a long line public address help points and extensive CCTV coverage. An incredible number of CCTV cameras we've installed, not just in the platforms, but in the car parks so that people feel secure leaving their cars on these unmanned stations. And of course we have electric car charging points, a key plank of the Scottish government's future transport policies to encourage electric vehicle use. So we did install electric car charging points at all the stations. So moving on to the track laying now there's various ways of laying railway track. Our contractor Bam Nuttle have a Dutch arm and they do a lot of track work on the continent and they decided to do it the way they've often done it over there. They bring in the ballast and the sleepers by road. The sleepers are then spread to the correct spacing using this very clever mechanical device. And then the rails are brought in and trains now we arranged the rails to be provided. Bam have this special device which pulls and pushes the rails off the train. Down onto the track and then pushes them forward along rollers. We had four of these trains each train holds 24 rails that's enough for 1.3 kilometres of track. And basically we laid 1.3 kilometres a day. So there was one train on site. There was another one being loaded at Skunthorpe. And there was one train coming north and one train going south at any one time. So four trains in a circuit to provide this ongoing supply of rail to the borders railway. This is a close-up of the machine. This is the business end. But you can see here this device at the end of the rails just really lifts the end up the real pushing and pullings done by this machine here. A lot of people are surprised how flexible railway rails are. But trust me they're not flexible if you're buying your head off them. So here we see another time-lapse video showing the rails coming off. This is them coming off the wagon down onto the track. That's them being clipped up and then the train will move forward to the next position. The next lot of rails come down and so on. Now all the track laying was done during the winter of 2014-15. We did have some winter challenges as you can see here. Once all the track was down we had to lay all the top ballast. These were brought in on our network rail hopper trains. About 100,000 tons of ballast had to be installed along the line. Now interestingly some of these trains were some of the longest heaviest trains ever running in the British railway network. Because we had the railway it was under construction. We could use these very long hopper trains to bring the ballast in. We had a variety of track machines to weld the rails to this is a tamping lining machine to get the track in its final position. And then in February 2015 Keith Brown who was the Cabinet Secretary for Transport at that time came and we had a special event at Tweedbank to mark the final rails being clipped up with golden clips which are still there but they're just painted. So they're not actually worth anything. I worked about the signalling in the line this was the next big challenge. All the kind of brains of the signalling are kept in these special containers at each point where we have a double to single track connection. All the signalling uses modern equipment this is a modern LED signal requires very little maintenance. And all the all the important stuff is in that previous slide I showed you of the equipment building. These are all connected up using fiber optic cable and there are no the only line side cables on this railway are these buried fiber optic cables so you sometimes hear about disruption in the railways because of cable theft. Well there are no copper cables to steal in this railway. The only stuff is fiber optics which isn't worth anything and it's buried anyway so more. That was one of it's one of the first times that fiber optics and internet protocol systems have been used on the signalling system of a major UK railway. The last part of the signalling was the GSMR masks and that stands for global system mobile for railways and 14 masks along the route and these all had to be installed to allow radio communication between the signalman and the train drivers. We followed up a period of testing the railway until the railway was commissioned that's when it became an official railway rather than a construction site in June 2015. This was the proving train we ran that day and ScotRail very kindly laid on their special borders livery passenger train and we did final checks and all the platforms. This was the first time a train had run at line speed down down the borders railway. They then followed a period of extensive driver training. ScotRail employed some new drivers based at Gallish Hills, but also some of the existing drivers in the Edinburgh area had to be had to learn the route on this new railway. We opened in 6th of September the official opening was actually in the 9th of September and we were very honored to have Her Majesty the Queen come along and we took her down to Gallish Hills, hauled by John Cameron's beautiful A4 Pacific Union of South Africa. And this is the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh with Nicola Sturgeon unveiling the plaque at Tweedbank and it was the day that she became Britain's longest reigning monarch. So it really was a special occasion with worldwide coverage, you know, partially because of, well probably mainly because it was the day she became Britain's longest reigning monarch, but it meant the borders railway literally had worldwide coverage. Now I should say just before I continue with this, I'm going to finish with just two very short clips. These were taken from the Queen's train as it as it traveled through Gallish Hills. We were actually in the coach behind and it was a fabulous experience. There had been crowds come out camping, having picnics at various places along the line, waving to the Queen's train as it went past. So what you see here is what the Queen saw as she, as the train came through Gallish Hills. Well, that concludes the presentation. I hope you enjoyed that retrospective look back at the construction of the borders railway. And I'll be delighted to take any questions. Trisha, over to you. We now have a grand total of nine questions that have come forward. So I think you will start with a fairly general one. We'll start with some general ones moving to the more technical ones, I think. And Steve had a question, does this railway have an unusually high number of bends. Yes, it does. Because of the geography that it passes through, it does a lot of twisting and turning to gain height, as I said earlier on, and then it basically follows the twists and turns of the river Gala. So it does have the vast majority of the railway is on curve, as you would see from the video there. It's also got an inordinately large number of bridges and culverts. I mean, because of the gradients and the criss-crossing of rivers that it does. So that's why there are so many bridges that had to be either built or refurbished as part of the works. Right, another general question from Anne. What's the passenger numbers being like compared to the predicted numbers? I'm not an expert on that, but it has been hugely successful when you put it against what the projected numbers were. The original projections for the railway were in the region of 600,000 or 750,000 passengers per year for the first year or so. In actual fact, in the first year there was well over a million, and indeed it was close to the million and a half. One of the interesting things is that the original work that was done in the usage of the line suggested that most of the patronage would come from the north end of the railway and the kind of Gore Bridge, S Bank, Dalkeith area, where there was a big population who travel into Edinburgh every day. Not so many people using it over the whole length of the line. In actual fact, it's the reverse has been the case. It's had a much heavier usage from the south end of the line, which is good for the railway because we built it all the way down to Tweed Bank. The car park at Tweed Bank is full and overflowing every day from the early days of the railway opening. So it really has been well used from the south end. So some of the stations at the north end haven't quite still done very, very well, but not as well as the ones at the south end. And partly that's, it's been a victim of its own success. A lot of the trains were so busy with people travelling from the south that they were full by the time they got to the north end. Pardon me. The other thing is that the railways still has a lot of competition from Lothian buses who do a very good service from the Gore Bridge area into Edinburgh. So the borderline is the railways been hugely successful in terms of passenger numbers but also in terms of the identifiable benefits it's brought to the borders. A lot of the tourists and hospitality industries all reported a sizeable increase in the year after the railway opened, including things like Abbotsford House, the home of Sir Walter Scott, a major tourist on the borders, a lot of the pubs and restaurants and Shields even noted a major increase in business. Of course, all that's been turned on its head recently with with the current crisis. Hopefully, hopefully, you know, eventually we'll get back to where we were. But certainly up up to the point of COVID coming along the railway, the railway had been hugely successful. Thank you. Now we have another question with two great minds thinking like both Steve and David have asked if there are any plans or thoughts of extending the railways south of Tweed Bank perhaps as far as call out. Well, the campaign group campaign for borders rail have always actively campaigned for the whole railway to be reinstated. The British government position was well let's see how the new railway does before we consider extending it. Because of the success in the first few years there has actually been some work done looking at, would it be worthwhile extending the railway now that's at the where some detailed feasibilities are being organized. I don't know where that's got to at the moment, but that is the next stage to do some in depth feasibility to look at how what would be the best way of taking the railway further. Personally, I could see it going to Huyc. Beyond Huyc to Carlyle is probably a bigger ask. You know, if you really want to build a new railway down to Carlyle, you really want it to be a high speed mainline modern railway. And the Waverley line as it was was always a challenge to operate. It always had a lot of difficult curves and and gradients. So I suspect going all the way to Carlyle might not happen, but I could see it going to Huyc. But I stress that's just my opinion. Thank you. And Gary wants to know whether we whether you had to pay the Duke of the clue to use this land. And if so, how much was the man paid? Well, all all the landowners of course were due compensation and the compensation was to agree market rates. It was very tightly controlled through the criteria that was laid down in the act of Parliament so no one should have lost out of it but no one should have made a lot of money out of it either. So yes, obviously the land that was compulsorily purchased, then then the land owner would be compensated for for the loss of the value of that land. And in some cases, if it affected their business, they would be they would be further compensation that there was actually housing built along the railway line in various places, and those people had were displaced from their houses. And they received compensation for that, of course, and where the land is used temporarily again there's a kind of scale of compensation but it's on a, you know, a much reduced level compared with compulsorily permanently taking the land. I can't tell you exactly what the numbers were because I don't actually know there was literally hundreds of landowners involved throughout the borders line and it wouldn't be, it wouldn't be right. I don't know what the overall numbers were and it wouldn't be right to talk about them in detail anyway. Thank you. I'm going to move on to some of the technical questions now. And we have one from Geraint asking if you could elaborate on your comment about passive provision for electrification. How much work would be required to electrify the line. Well, the, the idea of passive provision is that we're not, we're not adding any costs, any specific items of equipment and for electrification at this stage, but anything we build should not preclude electrification. And so importantly, all the bridge and tunnel clearances are such that you should be able to get the overhead wires through these bridges when the railways electrified without having to rebuild the bridge or lower the track again, which, which you often have to do. If certainly with tight, tight bridges over the railway. The signaling equipment is another area where that is designed such that it's, it's immune to AC electrification so minimal work would be required in the signaling side as well. Very often when a railways electrified, depending on the type of signalings installed, there can be quite a lot of work involved to immunize the track circuits of the signaling equipment against the, the effect of AC current that shouldn't be required in the borders railway. And we have another technical question from Tony who I think is looking for a Saturday night shift during some CWR stressing he's asking how does a fixed steel rail cope with thermal contraction and expansion with the rather large variation in temperature nowadays and perhaps more in future. I could let you answer that trash. Well, Do that if you like. Well, I'll carry on. Modern railway track is very, very heavy. We've got concrete sleepers, which are a lot heavier than than the old timber sleepers we used to have and the fast things that hold the rails to the concrete sleepers are very, very strong. So so basically the track is largely held in place by its own weight. However, to to assist that process when we install the rails we actually stretch them or stress them such that the most of the time in the Scottish winter. They're actually in tension. If you break the rail, it'll spring apart. And they're designed to be in a stress free situation at 80 degree Fahrenheit. I think that's the right temperature trish from what I remember. And in very hot days, yes, the rails do go into compression. But because of the weight of ballast, we've got a lot more ballast around the track as well. Heavy sleepers, good fast things. The track doesn't actually buckle at all. Something a little less technical, but a great interest. Parts asking if the Badgers took up residence in their artificial sets. And I could go on to ask whether they're now back at home. Yes, they did. And some of them, I'm not sure. I think some of them decided to stay put. Others decided to migrate as they do. They find their own homes again. The key thing was to provide them with a temporary home while we did the railway work. Inevitably, some will find their way back into the railway embankments again as wild animals and create burrows again. I mean, we own quite a bit of extensive land around the railway, so there's plenty of room for them. But it was a challenge because you can't just go in and build a temporary set and expect them to move. You have to go through a process with Scottish Environment Scotland and get licenses to deal with all these protected species. And only at certain times of the year. So it is quite time consuming and quite a challenging process because it does literally stop the work at times if you suddenly come across one that you hadn't expected to find. Thank you. We'll move back to a slightly more technical question. Ronald's asking about the spread between single and double track and how was it determined the various lengths of both? Basically, there had been a basic track layout done at the parliamentary stage during the early 2000s as part of the feasibility study. Now we took that and we ran various, basically various computer models and, you know, inevitably, there was a need to get the right economy between providing extensive facilities on the railway and trying to ensure reliability of the railway as well. The railway was never going to be double track all the way. It was always going to have a single track with loops. That was clear right from the beginning, even at the parliamentary stage. So it's difficult because in a single track rail with 30 miles long, if you get delays on the single line, it's going to have a knock on effect. There's no getting away from that. But the idea is to get the right balance. And we believe we got that with the location and the length of the loops. You would see maybe in that speeded up video that every time there was a passing loop. These are long loops, by the way, they're not just short. The idea is the trains pass each other at speed and every loop there was another train coming the other way. And for a half-hourly timetable, there is literally a train at every passing place as you go down the line. The train gets to Tweed Bank and it needs to turn and come back north again. And again, it will meet a train at every passing place. So it's an intensively used bit of railway. Right, now we have several more general questions coming in and guarantee asking other major rail projects that you could recommend you for building elsewhere in Scotland. So this is your chance to build. Of course, it would be nice to see the borders real. We extended, first of all, as I said earlier, I think it could easily justify going forward to Hoike and it would give the people of Hoike a lot more benefits from the line. Beyond that, some of us who have been retired, not particularly me personally but we have helped with some of the work being done at the Leavenmouth branch and those of you who watch government announcements over the past year or so will have seen that the government's given the go-ahead for the reopening of the line to Leaven from Thornton Junction, which is really great because that's another fairly major area of population. It's a kind of deprived area and it's ideal for the benefits of rail we can bring in terms of connectivity, spreading economic benefits into that area. The one that always bugs me, living as I do in Perth, was the direct line that used to go from Perth down to Edinburgh. There was a direct line from, that opened at the same time as the 4th Bridge, interestingly enough, in 1890. They went up through Denfermline, through Cowdenbeath, up through Kinross to Bridge of Erne and it would have been a lot shorter than the railways that take you from Perth to Edinburgh at the moment. The line was actually scheduled for development in the late 1960s. It wasn't part of the beaching proposals but it closed because the Board in London didn't, at that time, wouldn't provide the funds for investment in the line. The Scottish region of British Rail at that time, for whatever reason, took the hump and closed the line. In January 1970, a year after the Borders line, the main line from Perth to Edinburgh, the main line from Perth to Edinburgh was closed by British Rail and all the trains were diverted round by Stirling at that time. If you're a conspiracy theorist, two years after that, the M9 motorway, M90 motorway was built on top of the old railway line. There are those that say it was a deliberate sabotage. I don't think it didn't quite happen that way but certainly it's a huge shame that without demolishing the M90 motorway, I don't think we're going to see the direct Perth to Edinburgh line. What should we have made the service from Inverness to Perth to Edinburgh so much faster than it is today? Well, we can dream on. We've got perhaps a bit of a safer question for you and it's about disabled access to the line. And Alan's asking what provisions were made for accessibility and you suggest such as platform heights? Yeah. First of all, all the stations have good disabled access. Well, I say good disabled access. They all have, let me think now, they've all got disabled ramps. Have we got lifts anywhere? I don't think we have. The single, obviously the single line platforms are easier to arrange access to than the double line platforms where you have to go right over the railway. So first of all, access down onto the railway platforms is a requirement. The railway actually had to meet the requirements of the interoperability PRM which stands for persons of reduced mobility regulations. And that's an EU regulation. However, interestingly, when it comes to platforms, all platforms in the UK still have to generally be built to the standard railway height, which is 915 millimeters above rail level, 610 to the side of the track. And there's a maximum stepping distance into the train. Now, why aren't we providing level access? Well, the truth is you can't really easily do that with the UK type of platform and train gauge. Places where that has been done either on certain underground stations in London or on the Heathrow Express line where you've got dedicated rolling stock. And there are special precautions the train has to slowly come into the platform because one of the issues with mainline trains is the dynamic effect of rocking from side to side. Not every train stops at the station. So you have to allow clearance for fast trains going through the station and also for freight going through the station. Now, although that's not a major issue in the borders, they have to be designed to meet these kind of requirements. So there are limitations in what you can do in terms of getting a level access into the train. However, Scotrail provide ramps. One of the notable features of the first few months of operation was the number of people in wheelchairs using the railway. Because if you didn't have a car, they couldn't have used the bus previously because they didn't have disabled compliant buses get up and down the A7. So people people were using the railway and wheelchairs because they could get access into the trains. There's a whole thing going on just now about PRM compliant trains. There are still a few running around that are not compliant, but I think all the ones in the borders line are PRM compliant. So it's not a perfect answer, but that's where we are at the present time. Thank you. Now, we're getting down to the last two questions and we're walking to the future here. And HW is asking, is it a candidate for hydrogen powered electric trains? Not sure how much you know right now. Well, I know I'm not an expert on them, but generally speaking, the best way to power trains so that they don't use diesel fuel and don't have any emissions is to electrify them. That's the simplest way to put the wire above the train, power the trains directly. It means they don't have to carry their own power generation plant. The only place, my understanding is the only place that perhaps hydrogen trains or battery trains are useful as in relatively short stretches of line or lines that can never justify being electrified because of their limited usage. But for a line like the borders, it should be a fairly straightforward job to electrify it. There's a lot of government ministers like to talk about hydrogen powered trains because it's seen as something new and exciting. It really doesn't work very well because hydrogen doesn't have the energy density of diesel fuel. And it just can't provide the same level of power as you get through a 25 kilovol overhead wire. So, you know, that's the future. The next stage, I think, for the borders rail, we would be to electrify it. And that would give added benefits in terms of acceleration, probably reduce journey times as well. Excellent job of answering that one here. Thank you. Now, you mentioned government ministers. And Garance has asked, this is your final question. The Prime Minister has suggested a bridge to Ireland. Would you consider that to be at all feasible? You've built the borders railway, how about across to Ireland? I know nothing whatsoever to do with that and I'm going to qualify to comment on it. Is there not a big trench full of Second World War munitions or something in the middle of the Irish Sea? I would have thought it was a terribly feasible idea, but who knows, stranger things have happened. Who knows indeed. Right, well, Hugh, thanks ever so much for that talk and your excellent efforts at answering that range of questions. Pleasure. Thank you.