On 13 February 2019, members of the Association for Geographic Information were invited to visit the Edinburgh Tram depot and control room.
The Edinburgh Tram opened in 2014 after a complex and controversial project history. However, passenger patronage demonstrates the popularity of the scheme, with the 2018 figure of 7.3 million customer journeys well above even the most optimistic forecasts, growing by 40% over the last three years. Passenger surveys indicate a satisfaction rate of 99%, which is six points above the industry average.
The tram line currently serves the city centre from Edinburgh Airport and Ingliston Park and Ride, by-passing the congested road corridor at Corstorphine and passing through the financial district of Edinburgh Park. There is a rail interchange at Edinburgh Gateway, near the airport, which allows access to the airport from the north and which sits at the hub of land allocated for future development, a welcome test of the policy of providing enabling infrastructure to support future growth.
Tram route copyright City of Edinburgh Council, contains Ordnance Survey data © Crown copyright and database right (2019), base map from Bing © Microsoft (2019)
The depot itself is located between the airport and the Gyle shopping centre, close to Edinburgh Gateway. The tram operational team consists of around 180 employees, mostly drivers and revenue protection staff, with an engineering, administrative, control room and management team. The managing director, Lea Harrison, provided a comprehensive introduction and briefing at the beginning of the visit.
The tram scheme was a longstanding proposal of City of Edinburgh Council, following various innovations including the very successful park and ride network and bus priority routes and the less successful guided busway, attracting Scottish Government funding for three tram routes around the city on an east-west loop and southwards to the hospital and bio-quarter. After various high profile project problems, this was curtailed to the Airport to York Place route, but a proposal to extend the route to Leith will soon be decided upon by city councillors. A preliminary design already exists for this extension and much of the troublesome underground utility diversionary work was completed prior to the abandonment of the route, lessening potential concerns about the extension. The current tram network also provides a central “critical mass” for extension, delivering a profit two years ahead of schedule, similar to the way in which the highly successful Manchester Tram scheme has been extended.
The 14 kilometre network relies upon twenty-seven tram vehicles, which were procured at the outset of the project to allow detailed design to meet vehicle performance requirements. The AGI delegation was pleasantly surprised when we were told we would be allowed to drive a tram on a short stretch of track, under supervision of course. The vehicle is simple enough to operate, with a single lever, but with an extensive array of CCTV screens and safety devices. Driver training takes some 8-12 weeks and is comparable with heavy rail driver training. Unlike heavy rail, the rail points are changed by the driver rather than by signallers, although the AGI delegation was not allowed to proceed quite that far.
The vehicles are maintained in an engineering facility, which mainly functions during a night-time window of a few hours when the network is not operational. The power system is 750V DC and inherently lethal, so a system of steps and locking gates allows access to the top of the vehicle and the various electrical components. Power is delivered by overhead catenary wires that are attached to poles or to building fixings, depending on the historic character of the area, with fixings favoured where key views may be obscured. A pantograph rises from the vehicle, to connect with the overhead lines and the electric current, delivered from six sub-stations along the route. The sub-stations provide some redundancy so, if a section of overhead line is disabled, the remainder of the network can still run.
As well as the power system, the mechanical parts are maintained in the workshop. This includes topping up sand in the vehicles, which is used to aid adhesion, and removal and replacement of moving parts including bogies and wheels.
The network is monitored from a control room which overlooks the main depot yard. Full coverage of the network is provided, with both vehicles and the electrical supply monitored on screens, by operators who are in radio contact with drivers and others involved in network support. A manual whiteboard is used as a backup and possibly as a reassurance that the old methods can still work. The “Beast from the East” provided an unusual challenge in 2018, when trams continued to run despite the rest of the city’s transport system being snow-bound, a necessary solution as the shut-down and restart of the system could have taken three days.
The Control Room’s busiest time of day is during the night when all trams come to the depot and get safety checked. This includes all trams being filled to full weight capacity using sandbags and put through a full break test. By the start of every day, each tram has been confirmed to be safe and ready for handover to the drivers.
A key feature of the way the scheme is managed is innovation: journey times have been reduced, with a tram every 3 minutes at peak times, defibrillators are carried on all vehicles, operations are aligned with major events, and bicycles are permitted on trams, unlike on similar schemes. The ticket structure has a single fair covering all of Edinburgh (except the airport) and also covering the Lothian Buses network. The trams are managed at the strategic level by Transport for Edinburgh, also responsible for Lothian buses and the city’s cycle hire scheme, offering further scope for integration and synergy.
The future direction of the Edinburgh tram should continue to Leith and Newhaven, providing an east-west axis for public transport and linking up with more deprived areas of the city. Although the scheme has proven to be very successful, despite its troubled beginnings (the Edinburgh Tram Inquiry website is worth a visit for anyone interested in the project history) there has been a longstanding failure to link the growth in tram patronage with measures to reduce road traffic levels in the city, which have increased by 7.5% between 2012 and 2017 (from “Edinburgh by Numbers”, City of Edinburgh Council, 2018). Park and ride usage at Ingliston has increased greatly since tram operations commenced and is almost at capacity on most working days. Air quality concerns may provide an impetus for traffic reduction and any extension of the network to Leith will provide a fascinating opportunity to shape evolving transport policy in the context of the challenges of the 21st century, drawing upon the wealth of data that is available in the city, which should be of keen interest to spatial data professionals.
Article by Iain Paton, Member of the AGI and Royal Town Planning Institute, and a former consultant on the Edinburgh Tram during the preliminary design phase, 2005-2007.
Trip Organiser: Martin Ewart, Member of the AGI and Co-founder of Earthwave. Contact martin@earthwave.co.uk for any questions about future Tram Control Room trips.
For more information on Edinburgh Trams, go to: https://edinburghtrams.com
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