We were in ...wait for it...Arrochar this morning, having spent my birthday weekend over that way. Needed to be back home sharp to get Eilidh to school, checked out of our cabin at 8.15am and hit the A82. All fine, albeit care needed, until near Cameron House on Loch Lomond and the queue started. Trucks, ice, ineptitude (of drivers, Police, you name it), and you have a heady cocktail of fun. In the main a couple of big "wagons" couldn't make the incline due to pack ice beneath the rapidly falling (but *very* accurately forecast) snow.
Original plan was to get to motorway "network" and take the "safe" route home.
One or two Radio Scotland bulletins and a few classic "phone-ins" on Real Radio, like, were all that were needed to convince me that actually the x-country route of the A811 from Balloch through Drymen, Buchlyvie etc to Stirling was the answer.
Getting to Balloch from Cameron House area took around 2 hours.
Killed an hour in the McDonalds (scene of the grand start of "Way out West Dubya Run" some 7 or 8 years ago, btw!), then with the ever-present help of Alistair in Mission Control, tackled the A811.
Very little traffic, road had been ploughed and gritted although was mostly pack-ice with the odd slushy area under the trees. Entertaining
Passed a couple of trucks struggling up hills.
Reached Stirling, already with a plan to avoid the M9 etc which was reportedly "gridlocked", by using A905 out through Fallin then Skinflats then Grangemouth (the fug from Ineos always keeps things nice and warm there eh Neil
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Saw evidence of movement on M9, but M876 from Kincardine Bridge looked v slow so drove right under it and onward to Grangemouth with no delays. Tempted to join M9 for one half mile section to J4 but thought better of it, can you imagine if we got jammed up barely 4 miles from home, so wound through the winter wonderland of Polmont, and back home at last to Linlithgow.
To find our estate looking much like it did last weekend before we cleared a load of our own snow
Car abandoned in a neighbour's drive as no guarantee of getting it round to our own, shipped all the weekend's gear to ours via sledges (!) and then started to reflect upon it all.
Best part of 5 hrs on the road to travel maybe 80 miles. 16mph average. Not bad, I think, against today's benchmarks!! Bulk of delay was waiting for struggling trucks to give it up on the A82.
Al's advice to seek a hot cuppa somewhere and some space for the kids was a masterstroke - killing an hour at McD's in Balloch is not part of our usual itinery but made a lot of difference, as the snowfall had stopped by the time we were ready to leave. We were keen to complete the journey in daylight, though, as the forecast was for v v low temps and given what we'd witnessed, we knew we were dead meat if still out on the roads in those conditions tonight.
I have just seen Stewart Stephenson, the Scottish "Transport" Minister, being interviewed on Newsnight Scotland. I imagined he'd get a pasting, and despite it not being Paxman doing the asking, indeed he did. He claimed the snowfall was "un-forecast". WRONG, I watched the BBC weather team describe the expected band of snow in fairly accurate detail, and I reckoned it would very much coincide with rush-hour...and our own, unrelated, journey back home from holiday. The Govt can't hide behind that one.
He also claimed their response was "first class". WRONG. Well, nothing personal on any of the individual people on-duty, but if collectively that was "first class" then those with an eye for Scottish Independence need to take a long hard look at themselves.
It's easy to be an armchair judge of all this, but like many others, I was out in amongst it. I was reflecting on what you would do in a position of authority if the most important motorway in your country was logjammed from J1 to J26 (which I heard on the radio at one point in the day). Well, how long does it take to remove a section of the now-continuous armco at crossover points normally used for contraflows? A few hours to do it non-destructively? A couple of hours if you attack it with WMDs (as Robin would...)? Then get segments of traffic released from the goldfish bowl of a m-way, filter them off the next junction (pre-gritted and ploughed of course) and hey presto.
To get information to all motorists quickly is not easy but in most instances many will be tuned to a radio station, so broadcast a consistent message on there like "please vacate the outside lane, a plough will be clearing it to allow safe passage to the next exit, please tell drivers around you who may not have heard this msg" etc. You could also deploy pairs of Police officers to "floorwalk" the standstill carriageway, at say 1-mile intervals, to pass on said consistent message and also log any major problems and feed those in to "control" to be prioritised.
The list of other workarounds goes on...
right now its -9. The police have a lot to answer for on this one they should have been allowing traffic to leave by whatever means even the hard sholder should have been in use for 4 X4s etc . If I was caught up in that in the jeep I would be driving along the banking..