NEWGARL is the response of thgRAIL to the Scottish Government's decision to cancel GARL - the Glasgow Airport Rail Link.

GARL was announced publicly on 4th November 2004 by the SPT and then continued through a lengthy public consultation exercise before being formally promoted as a private Bill to the Scottish Parliament on 15th January 2006. The Bill was subjected to parliamentary scrutiny by the Glasgow Airport Rail Link Committee before being approved and recommended to Parliament on 27th November 2006 where an overwhelming vote of 118 to 8 in favour of the plan led to the Bill being granted royal assent in January 2007 on the basis of a £200 million budget.

The Glasgow Airport Rail Link Act 2007 granted the authority to construct the rail link between Paisley St James Station and Glasgow International Airport together with the necessary works to improve capacity on the railway between Paisley and Glasgow.

The new rail link featured as a prominent part of the successful bid by Glasgow to host the 2014 Commonwealth Games and was shown in the bid to be a major part of the games legacy.

In April 2008, Transport Scotland took on the role of Authorised Undertaker under the GARL Act and proceeded to combine the GARL project with Network Rail’s plans for an upgrade of the Paisley rail corridor. In a complicated arrangement the Paisley Corridor Improvements (PCI) were combined with GARL to create a single project to be implemented jointly by Network Rail and Transport Scotland with an overall budget of some £390 million. To further complicate matters the combined project was renamed GARL which naturally led the public erroneously to believe that GARL had dramatically increased in cost.

This misconception was fatal to GARL and it is unclear whether it was deliberately nurtured to lead to a decision in September 2009 that the rail link be scrapped. The conspiracy theorists would love the issues surrounding the cancellation and how one week the project was announced as being on track for completion but the next it was summarily axed. That decision was finally ratified by the vote in the Scottish Parliament on the Scottish Budget for 2010/2011 when, with the support of the Scottish Conservatives, the SNP voted through a fiscal plan which excluded GARL.

This led to the creation of NEWGARL - a forum for the review and representation of a rail link between Glasgow and its international airport. It offers that most valuable opportunity which was denied by the Scottish Government - an open forum for the exchange of views on the rail link and it is hoped these views will lead to the revision of a project which is shovel ready for implementation by the next government after the May 2011 election. As such NEWGARL will be available to all political parties which support a rail link to Glasgow Airport for adoption or endorsement in their manifestos. However it is not anticipated that the SNP and Tories will apply.