Milestone
First steel masts go up on Borders railway electrification
By Staff Writer | 17 August 2026
Engineers have begun erecting the steel masts that will carry the overhead wires on the Borders railway, the first visible sign of a 26.2 million pound Scottish Government investment to electrify 13 kilometres of the route between Edinburgh and Tweedbank.
The milestone was announced on 17 August 2026. The scheme prepares the line for battery-electric trains due to arrive in the early 2030s, and the electrified section runs between Edinburgh and Tweedbank.
Work began in March. Since then teams have concentrated on installing the foundations for 350 new overhead line structures. Around half of those foundations are now complete, and the work has moved on to erecting the steel masts and support arms, which will become visible between Tweedbank and Bowshank Tunnel near Stow.
Most of the work is taking place overnight and at weekends to reduce disruption to passengers. Once all the structures are in place, attention turns to installing the wiring, testing the new equipment and final preparations for the introduction of the battery-electric fleet.
Much of the preparation for electrification was carried out before the railway reopened in 2015. Bridges, stations and other infrastructure were designed with future electrification in mind, which has reduced the need for major reconstruction now.
This is an exciting stage of the project because people can now start to see the railway changing. A huge amount of work has gone into planning and building the foundations, much of it behind the scenes, so seeing these new structures appear is a real achievement.
Lynsey Maclean, scheme project manager at Network Rail
What makes this project unique is that many of the decisions needed for electrification were taken when the railway was rebuilt more than a decade ago. That means we're able to deliver this significant upgrade with far less disruption than would otherwise have been needed.
Lynsey Maclean, scheme project manager at Network Rail
The milestone was marked with a visit last week by Calum Kerr, MSP for Midlothian South, Tweeddale and Lauderdale.
It was fantastic to see the progress being made on the Borders Railway electrification project and to meet the team delivering this important investment.
Calum Kerr MSP, Midlothian South, Tweeddale and Lauderdale
What the practitioner should take from this
The commercial interest in this scheme lies in a decision taken in about 2013, not in anything happening on site today. Passive provision, designing bridges, station canopies and earthworks for wires that will not be installed for another fifteen years, is a cost carried by one budget for the benefit of another. Where a promoter takes that decision it should be recorded in a way that survives the people who took it, because the value only appears when the second scheme is priced and the tenderers can see for themselves what does not need rebuilding.
Foundations for overhead line structures are the classic ground risk item on an electrification job. Each of 350 positions is fixed by the alignment rather than chosen for convenience, so the contractor cannot move away from a bad hole; it must be dealt with where it is. Practitioners pricing this kind of work should look closely at how the contract deals with obstructions, buried services and variable founding conditions at individual mast positions, and whether the risk sits with the party that carried out the ground investigation or the party that must build to the design.
The possession arrangements are the other commercial control. Overnight and weekend working buys the passenger service at the price of productivity, and the arithmetic is unforgiving: a shift that yields three hours of useful work after travel, isolation and handback is a different rate from one that yields eight. Where the number of possessions is fixed by the timetable rather than by the programme, a delay caused by one party can be very difficult to recover, because the lost shift cannot simply be replaced the following night.
None of that reflects on this project, where no dispute has been reported. It is the ordinary anatomy of a rural electrification scheme: fixed positions, constrained access, and a benefit banked more than a decade before it is drawn down.