South Scotland MSP Colin Smyth has welcomed the “long overdue” news that repair work is set to start on the A77 near Cairnryan- three years after it was hit by a landslip.
The road was badly affected at Marchburn near the boundary between South Ayrshire and Dumfries and Galloway during winter storms in 2014 but no major repair work has yet taken place. Since 2015 traffic lights have been in place on the road. TranServ have now announced that work to repair the road will start on 3 November. The road will be closed between 8pm on that day until 6 am on 6 November to allow the repair work to start.
South Scotland MSP Colin Smyth said, “There will be a huge sigh of relief that this long overdue work is eventually going to take place after 3 years of waiting, albeit it will cause some serious inconvenience. It has been massively frustrating to witness the complete lack of progress and to hear Transport Scotland and Transerv come up with excuse after excuse as to why they couldn’t have completed the work before now. Everyone accepts this work will be complex given the utter neglect there has been in that part of the road over the years resulting in the landslip. But the reality is, if this was the M8 in the central belt, the repair work would have been carried out within weeks of the landslip happening, not years. As usual the South of Scotland is the poor relation when it comes the Scottish Government investing in our roads, even just to make some of our trunk roads usable. Ultimately of course we need to see the road upgraded so incidents like this don’t happen in the future”.
