As white elephants go it may not be a match for HS2, yet almost seven years after it opened to the public in December 2016 there is no doubting that the £41 million Edinburgh Gateway station has massively failed to live up to its potential as an important new way of accessing Edinburgh Airport.
Spend a hour there on a weekday morning and it is easy to see why Edinburgh Gateway has not enjoyed the success of other Scottish openings and re-openings, such as the routes to Bathgate and Tweedbank, with very limited services calling at the station and a ludicrous £7.50 tram single fare for anyone wanting to take the 1.8-mile, 7-minute link to Edinburgh Airport.
The moment you alight from a tram at the specially-opened stop beneath Edinburgh Gateway station it is clear that no expense was spared in its construction, with two escalators that spring to life the moment you step onto them taking you up to a totally deserted ticket hall, where booking clerks have little to do and automatic barriers to the platforms are unmanned and left open.
When Edinburgh Gateway was being designed its two platform were made long enough to accommodate LNER HSTs (since replaced by the Azumas) that pass through on their journeys between Aberdeen and London. But Azumas, like the one pictured below, have never served the station, with LNER services stopping instead at Inverkeithing, where there is a regular bus link to Edinburgh Airport.
Also not stopping at Edinburgh Gateway are the hourly ScotRail Inter7City services between Edinburgh Waverley and Aberdeen, which one would have thought would produce a sizeable number of airport-bound passengers from the north-east of Scotland.
That just leaves hourly stopping services between Edinburgh and Perth, Edinburgh and Dundee and Fife Circle workings to and from Cowdenbeath and Glenrothes with Thornton, which helps explain the paltry number of passengers in edidence at a station that has spectacularly failed to live up to the hopes of its promoters in the Scottish Government.
But a solution to the issue of how to realise Edinburgh Gateway’s true potential is not hard to work out. Firstly, it needs to be served by the longer distance services that currently sail straight through, and secondly there needs to be a realistic fares structure on Edinburgh Trams that rewards passengers for using the station rather than expecting them to pay a ridiculous £7.50 for a less than two mile hop to the airport.
RailwayWorld.net 
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