Transport Scotland have announced that four bidders have been selected for the £11 million improvements due to start at Pulpit Rock next year.
The scheme will see traffic signals being removed from this section after 30 years and the road upgraded to enable the free flow of traffic.
The four companies now to bid for the project are:
- Morrison Construction;
- McLaughlin & Harvey;
- Balfour Beatty;
- Morgan Sindall.
Transport Minister Keith Brown has also decided to proceed with the scheme to construct a bypass of Crianlarich on the A82. The Minister gave the go ahead for the upgrade after considering the findings and recommendations from a public hearing.
Mr Brown said: ‘The Scottish Government is committed to upgrading the A82 – it is a vital economic and social lifeline which connects the businesses and communities in Highlands and Islands with those in the central belt.
‘It is encouraging that there has been strong interest in the Pulpit Rock project from the construction industry and that plans to upgrade this route are progressing on schedule. It is an ambitious project – we need a solution that fits well with the specific geographical challenges of this route, while maintaining the renowned beauty of the area.
‘However, with bidders selected and the design process moving forward, commuters can look forward to relief on this route in the near future.
‘I have also given the go ahead for the Crianlarich Bypass. This scheme will benefit road users by removing the significant delays which occur at the existing A85/A82 priority junction.
“Along with the Pulpit Rock works and the Crianlarich Bypass, we now want to take forward the design work to identify a preferred alignment for an upgrade of the 16 km section between Tarbet and Inverarnan.’
The Pulpit Rock improvements will involve the provision of a new 0.4km single two-lane carriageway, which includes a new viaduct structure that runs parallel to the loch shoreline for 180m and online widening of the existing carriageway to the north of the structure.
As with all major infrastructure projects, Transport Scotland will carry out extensive consultation and engagement with the local community throughout the process. Public exhibitions are to be held this summer in areas which will be affected by the works.
Construction is expected to last for around one year and the anticipated construction cost for the scheme is £11 million.
With regard to the wider upgrade of the route, Transport Scotland recently completed environmental and engineering surveys on the route and these will be used to help identify a preferred alignment for an upgrade of the 16 km section between Tarbet and Inverarnan. Work to procure specialist design consultants is underway.
The Crianlarich Bypass scheme will provide approximately 1.3 kilometres of new, single two-lane carriageway from the south of Crianlarich to the north of the village. The next step in the statutory process for the scheme is to publish made road orders (which show the final land-take and line of the road), which is expected to happen this Autumn.
The A82 is the main link road from Glasgow and the Central Belt to Fort William, the Highlands and the Western Isles.
Now for the A83.
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Good news – but it’s surely rather surprising that ‘a preferred alignment for an upgrade of the 16km section between Tarbet and Inverarnan’ has yet to be identified.. Given that this has been on the government trunk roads engineers ‘wish list’ since time immemorial.
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I agree with Robert – no point in building Pulpit Rock until the complete route between Tarbet and Inverarnan has been defined. Pulpit Rock isn’t even the biggest problem – that’s the section about half a mile North of Sloy, where there is 500m sandwiched between the lochside wall and railway. It is that narrow twisty section which is a problem whenever two coaches or LGVs meet – regular users will notice how few LGVs use the route. Of course most of them go to Stirling because that’s where they want to go – Grangemouth, Bathgate or the South – and they will still have to navigate the lower bridge at Crianlarich because we’re only getting half a bypass. Do the penpushers in Edinburgh not realise that the A85/4 is the more important road commercially?
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It would be interesting to know whether there’s already a notional plan for a future ‘other half’ of the Crianlarich bypass, and also whether the best alignment for at least some of the route between Tarbet and Inverarnan might turn out to be above the railway, and whether the current ‘water level’ scheme at Pulpit Rock designed to tie in with the existing substandard alignment might conflict with this.
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Though it is, I suppose, well past time for the Tarbet-Inverarnan stretch to be updated (though I take Duncan Martin’s point entirely) I would hope this could be done with greater sensitivity to preserving the lochside road’s extraordinary beauty than was done with the sector further south. There, though it may have been inevitable that a ‘smoothed’ modern road would obliterate the old road with its charming scenes of established woodland and shore, roadside scrub has been allowed to grow to the extent that views of the loch are now few and far between. Far better perhaps to build a modern road further up the hillside – the Tyndrum-Bridge of Orchy sector shows this need not be an eyesore – for the traffic in a hurry, and retain the lochside road for the tourists. Loch Lomond, after all, is a world-famous attraction, easily reachable from the Central Belt, and this is not perhaps the unaffordable frivolity it might seem.
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There was nothing inevitable about the design of the new Loch Lomond A82, but I suppose it was fairly typical for the time. I rue in particular the damage caused to Rhubha Mhor, plainly visible from many points around the loch.
I’m concerned that the Pulpit Rock sidey-bridge will end up being as inelegant in retrospect as that.
A high level road (and dare I say a straightened out railway alongside?) would be an elegant solution. One imagines a succession of viaducts and tunnels. The only problem is… you’d have to demolish Tarbet to get up onto the hill.
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Before the A82 was rebuilt between Luss and Tarbet alternative route proposals were presented to the public, and one was on a higher contour to avoid some of the more difficult topography at water level. However, at the end of the day, the increased risk of ice and snow affecting the higher route militated against it.
I doubt that any route north of Tarbet involving costly deviation of the railway would be entertained, and the more ‘straightening out’ involved, the higher the cost and potential for landscape damage, so maybe the Pulpit Rock scheme, involving a decent width of road but tight bends resulting in lower speeds than south of Tarbet, represents the order of the day for all the route – water level, minimal scarring of the hillside, but very twisty in places.
As far as I could see at the public exhibition at Ardlui of the Pulpit Rock project, it’s been designed to be much less obtrusive than the Rhubha Mhor ‘quarry’ between Inverbeg and Tarbet.
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