Edinburgh; Wednesday, 28 January, 2009

My previous evening wanderings had taken me past the new bus station, and on spec I had looked inside to see whether they had left luggage lockers, which they did and at quite a bit less than the office in the station, so after checking out of the hotel I headed there to deposit my bags before wandering back to the station to catch the train to Linlithgow

The palace at Linlithgow has played an important part in the history of Scotland, and was the birth place of one of their most famous monarchs – Mary, Queen of Scots. Having looked around the palace I headed back to the station and continued on to Falkirk, a couple of stops down the line.

Falkirk is the point where the Union canal from Edinburgh meets that canal from Glasgow. There is only one slight problem. The Union canal is 35 meters higher than the Glasgow canal. Up until the 1930’s this was overcome through a ladder of 12 locks which took a day to navigate but got you from one to the other. In the 1930’s with the canals virtually dead the locks were abandoned, and then built upon.

Leap forward to the latter years of the 20th century, and a growing interest in revitalising all of Britain’s inland waterways, but how could you link these two back up now that locks were gone. Step forward modern technology, many millions of pounds of lottery funding, and the worlds first (and still only) rotating boat lift – the Falkirk wheel, and it was to here that I was headed.

The guidebook recommended two ways to get there, either the number 3 bus from outside the station, or a short walk along the Union canal, taking about 20 minutes. I decided to be healthy and take the walk. In the end it took closer to 40 minutes (I assume that the person who wrote the guide book ran, as I don’t see how you can do two miles in 20 minutes in a relaxed manner!)

After visiting the wheel, and having a voyage on it, I decided to take the bus back rather then walk, this proved to be equally inaccurate, as the bus stops at the bottom of the hill that the station is on, there is no signage, and you can’t actually see the station from the bus, it was only the kindness of the bus driving letting me know it was my stop that prevented me from continuing all the way into town.

Up until this point everything had been going very well, trains turning up within minutes of getting to the station, and no delays. It wasn’t possible for it to continue, and at Falkirk it didn’t. On arriving at the station there was a sign saying there were no trains towards Edinburgh because of a problem with the signalling and points equipment. I had three choices. Wander down into the town and try to see if a bus went to Edinburgh, wait on the station for the problem to be fixed, or take the train further West into Glasgow and then come back via an alternative route.

As I had time to spare, and appeared to have spent most of this trip travelling long distances out of my way, I decided to take option three and hopped on the train that was just arriving to Glasgow. When I got to Glasgow the problem still hadn’t been fixed so I walked the short distance from Queen Street to Central station and then took the, very long way back to Edinburgh, pootling along the slowest set of lines between Glasgow and Edinburgh.

By the time I got back to Edinburgh it had been dark for over an hour, and checkin was due to open in 40 minutes time, so I headed back to the bus station, picked up my luggage, hopped on an airbus which turned up as I got to the bus stop and promptly ran all the way to the airport without stopping. By the time I arrived at the airport I was still 5 minutes early for checkin, not that that really mattered, the flight was already delayed by 40 minutes!