Now, if only the tram lines would be rebuilt things would be a lot smoother (at least from a public transport perspective).
Many are surprised to hear London has a tram line (South of the river, near Wimbledon), or that other towns have light rail schemes put back in within the last 20-40 years.
Guided bus routes have also started to emerge: smooth, segregated routes that run every few minutes using relatively cheap, replaceable and potentially entirely green vehicles with less up-front planning, consultation and construction than a light or heavy rail solution.
It's interesting to me that we seem to be going into an age where people value public transport more and more, but I suspect that's because VED and other costs associated with running a car in the UK have risen so sharply in recent years.
As for London, Wimbledon is one of four termini. The vast majority of the system is in Croydon, including loops through the town centre. There's regularly proposals for new extensions, but at the moment it looks like all of them are on ice down to lack of funding.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_town_tramway_systems_i...
For those who don't know, it was budgeted at £375 million, and eventually opened in a cut-back scheme (with about half the route cancelled) at £776 million.
Meanwhile the Borders railway appears to have opened successfully - and is immediately full at commuting times. I hope they left enough space to double track it.
Not for all of it was — there's certainly provision in places, but there's also parts where doubling would be incredibly expensive (the viaducts especially, where the maximum dimensions of the trains it has been built for are larger than it was originally built for, are inherently single-track now).
I think a 4tph / 2tph service pattern is fine and future capacity could be gained by platform extensions + longer trains.
I'd rather they 'value engineer' it to that level now than build a double track railway at significantly extra cost, and spend the ~£100m (educated guess) on other railway improvement projects for other areas (eg, the quad tracking of the ECML near Musselburgh to allow them a 2tph service - will cost around £100m for the various improvements).
The more disappointing part is that it tends to poison the well for ambitious public transport projects in future. That Leith extension will come some time after the Last Trumpet.
But, you know, just as long as RBS got their lovely public funded tram linking Gogar Deathstar to town then it was all worth it.
That's true, though it's only c. 3km of the 14km route. Certainly the 10km/h restriction round those bends makes it seem crazy slow and impedes progress out there. (I originally wrote, though deleted it, a question wondering how big the time saving would be; perhaps a minute?)
The section beyond Murryfield is mostly straight and it does get up to a fair speed between stops, which are mostly about 1km apart. It's the crawl around Murryfield (due to having to take a circular route around the edge of Haymarket (railway) depot) and the curves out by the airport that really kill any feeling of speed, though, no matter how fast it gets up elsewhere.