r/Glasgow Tools

GARL in that form with a terminal station at Glasgow Airport was never a goer. It was raised as an project idea in planning circles as far back as the 80s, with the central problem identified as early on as that too: you can't add a spur track running off the main Paisley to Glasgow corridor without also significantly interrupting services and trains-per-hour to Inverclyde and Ayrshire.

You can get round this to an extent by triple tracking the route, but you still have to find a way of bypassing Paisley Gilmore Street. On top of this, you need to justify the cost, both financially and to loss of other services. Which is hard to do for a spur route which serves one single station.

That it was resurrected in that form in the 2000s was baffling. It was never able to stand on its own feet as an infrastructure project cost-wise, so even if political promises were based on honest intentions, it gave people a false sense of what would be possible. That's not to say a cost effective version of the project doesn't exist.

A better way, which was identified in the late 80s as an alternative, would be a much longer spur line taking in many more stations beyond the airport alone, tilting the cost-benefit ratio in favour of the project. A route which extends so far that it becomes a loop back to Glasgow is even better, as it provides alternative routes for passengers. You can also have higher frequencies on the "north" side of the loop than on the south, so freeing up space for existing Inverclyde or Ayrshire services. A slight variation of this alternative idea is included in the current metro plans, which suggest a possible extension of the Paisley Canal rail line around Paisley, and then on to Renfrew and Glasgow.