Cars could either drive through the tube or use a shuttle train, cutting the current two-and-a-half-hour ferry journey to 40 minutes.
@Clavinova
The railway and road links would cost ££££££££££££ and take ????? number of years to complete.
The people of western Scotland would be absolutely correct to wonder why all of the connections to the wider UK that have been denied them up to now are suddenly so important.
Meanwhile, the people of NI would very likely get sick and tired of the flushing sound of their economy going down the tubes and vote to reunite with Ireland, which offers the prospect of frictionless access to EU markets, frictionless EU tourism, the benefits of the EU Regional Fund, inclusion in Irish policy on foreign investment and very slick and well-organised Irish tourism advertising, etc, etc.
These ideas about a bridge/ a floating bridge/ a tunnel, are all predicated on the notion that there will be an economy in NI by the time any of the dreams come to fruition.
And then there is this:
Do the architects/advocates of this scheme know where Portpatrick actually is? Have they ever visited the village by car or public transport?
The road out of Portpatrick is single carriageway. To head north on the A77 to Glasgow travellers need to negotiate the streets of Stranraer, and the same applies if you want to connect to the A75, which is the road used by traffic heading from here to England. On a good day and with a fair wind, the journey time by car to Glasgow or Carlisle from Portpatrick is more than two hours. There is no dual carriageway going north until you reach Ayr and no motorway until you reach Kilmarnock (check a map if you don’t know where they are in relation to Portpatrick). Going south, there are only a few overtaking opportunities towards Dumfries, then you face 23 miles of single carriageway from there to Gretna, and the M6.
A bridge over the North Channel will not make these connections any better. Without a complete roads upgrade, the Portpatrick area will not cope with the current amount of traffic from Ireland, let alone any increase.
In terms of road and transport links (or connectivity as the London-centric Tories talk about), we are the forgotten corner. Any feasibility study regarding a Celtic bridge must include the total cost. Infrastructure, dualling of both the A77 and A75, together with the impact on Portpatrick, the surrounding rich farmland, not to mention job losses from the closure of the ferry services out of Cairnryan, which incidentally are extremely efficient and well-run and get you to Northern Ireland in two hours. The ferries are rarely cancelled. We have had winds of over 60mph here, on a daily basis, for the best part of a week. The frequency of high winds here is increasing. How would a bridge in the North Channel cope?
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I’M not qualified to challenge Professor Alan Dunlop’s assertions about the engineering and architectural feasibility of the so-called “Celtic Bridge”; but as a long-standing and frequently disappointed supporter of investment in rail transport I have to say that his constant references to a “road and rail crossing” appear to be either naive or misleading.
Has Professor Dunlop forgotten, or not studied, the way in which a rail line over the Dornoch Firth road bridge was stymied by the then Tory-controlled Scottish Office? The sum saved was a mere £1.5 million at 1985 prices and the engineering issues were relatively simple.
If the Celtic Bridge were to go ahead, I suspect soundbites about a “road and rail crossing” would continue until the project was committed, when – surprise! – it would be discovered that both halves of the island of Ireland use a different rail track gauge from that of the mainland UK network. A quick study by consultants would bring up the economic difficulties of regaugeing the railways on the other side of the Irish Sea, the lack of capacity on the railway to Stranraer, the cost of reopening lines to serve the bridge ... and hey presto! The bridge would become road-only.
Even now, since the Northern Ireland ferry terminal was moved from Stranraer to Cairnryan, “train” passengers are treated to a bus ride from Ayr to Cairnryan, the greater part of the journey. In other words, rail is already being marginalised as a transport mode in the corridor which the bridge would serve. The bridge would simply take that process to its logical conclusion: closure of the railway south of Girvan and express buses from Glasgow to Belfast.
I doubt that the bridge project can serve both Unionist and nationalist aspirations, but whichever side of that debate you’re on, please don’t try to greenwash the project with rail references which are not borne out by experience.
www.thenational.scot/news/18237371.portpatrick-can-hardly-cope-current-flow-vehicles/
Do you know why Portpatrick features in articles about Undiscovered Scotland?
www.undiscoveredscotland.co.uk/portpatrick/portpatrick/index.html
Ever heard the phrase 'joined up thinking'?