Summer last year, beautiful sunny day, and I’m on a train with John Swinney and not just any train either. It’s the first train on the newly restored line to Levenmouth in Fife and I say to Mr Swinney ‘do you support more of this kind of thing then, reopening old lines?’ And he says ‘oh yes, trains are good’ but he also says some stuff about austerity and UK cuts so I’m not sure how serious he is. I’ll believe it when I see it.

But now here we are, a few months later and there’s a sign of hope, just a little one. Both the Scottish Government and the UK Government have agreed to fund the next step towards possibly, hopefully reopening another old railway line in Scotland. When I asked Mr Swinney last summer what he thought about new rail lines, he said they enable more investment and economic and social opportunities and allow people to access work and education and so on. Now we have another chance to prove it.

What the Scottish and UK governments have agreed to fund is a feasibility study into extending the Borders railway line that runs between Edinburgh and Tweedbank on to Carlisle. The two governments agreed in principle to pay for the study in 2021 but it’s only now that it’s finally been confirmed. They will stump up £10million - £5million each - which means that hopefully we can crack on and see where we get with it.

Exactly where the £10million will go is yet to be confirmed but I can tell them for free that the evidence is already out there about the effect new or reopened railway lines can have. There’s the Airdrie-to-Bathgate line for example, which was reopened to passenger services in the 80s and helped encourage regeneration in the area, for........

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