Busy day yesterday, we met our friends the  White family for lunch at Cafe Andaluz , then Team Holmes boarded an  Edinburgh tram for the very first time,  and rode in style from St Andrew Square to Shandwick Place.  For those of you unfamiliar with this transport farrago, they are massively over budget and put a lot of people out of business, as streets were ripped up and neither cars nor pedestrians could reach the shops and stores.   We now have an operational line running from York Place to the airport, via the Gyle and Edinburgh Park.  The promised access for Leith Walk etc. is very much on hold.

But they’re here now, so all that aside, it was jolly exciting, people queued from the first departure at 05:30 and there were many lovely pictures  on  Twitter, including the first dog on the tram and some memorabilia from the previous incarnation, via Tweeter Stewart Hardie.   In his picture below,  the tram board is from Edinburgh but the hat is from Glasgow.  Oh, and we managed to buy limited edition platinum tickets too, quite by accident as it transpires.

One thought, I hope that there is a recalibration soon  of the pedestrian crossing lights on Princes Street and indeed the whole route.  Each sequence now take noticeably longer, in some cases up to three minutes, and all that’s going to happen is that people are going to take chances.   Chief offenders which I have seethed at are the junctions with Waverley Bridge and South Charlotte Street.

Lastly, speaking of transport delays,  some two to three years after every other station on the  Fife Circle was given the accolade of an alternate name, someone at Scotrail has worked out how to spell Dalgety Bay in Gaelic.  The new sign was hoisted yesterday morning.