ANYONE attending the public special meeting of East Lothian Council at The Brunton last week could be forgiven for thinking their Local Development Plan was all about housing.

After the Scottish Government upped the ante and demanded we take 10,500 more houses in total, it was proper that such a 10 per cent hike and where they might go be properly debated.

What got seriously short shrift was the infrastructure to cope.

Not only did East Lothian Council have no plans for any new roads to link such developments but they confessed to having built none in their 20-year existence to accommodate the 6,000 homes already built.

Their ability to influence all the other key agencies seemed also non-existent.

So, as well as no relieving of Musselburgh’s High Street bottleneck, no commitment for Haddington’s new hospital, no widening the A720, and no new sewage works, perhaps most urgently there was no improvement in train provision.

Yet people are denied boarding at Musselburgh, despite our relatively new Class 380 four-car trains.

But the real rail crunch is in capacity of the main line (ECML). You just can’t fit many more stopping trains on without disrupting the fast ones.

So we’re stuck? Not quite. The solution would be to quadruple the whole track, as is common leaving London. But that is prohibitively expensive to retrofit.

However, a ‘cheap’ option is to get the slow trains out of the way so the fast ones can pass.

Currently, that’s not possible without sticking them in a siding.

But what if the siding had platforms?

What if Prestonpans railway station was given two extra platforms – one on the existing (and now redundant) coal siding loop and one on a new loop built opposite, stealing a sliver of land from Meadowmill and Col Gardiner?

The station car parks could still be used (and perhaps extended); trains halfway down to/from North Berwick could get out of the way while loading/unloading and the ECML capacity raised to provide more trains.

These could then run to Dunbar, where the same trick could be played.

How else will we deal with 10,000 more commuters on top of the 30,000 we already have?