COUNCILLORS in Edinburgh have voted to reprieve the city's floundering tram project, but now they'll have to find at least another £200 million.
The council considered four options, including abandonment and also a shortened line which would not have penetrated the city centre.
This option would have provided a line from Edinburgh Airport to Haymarket, where a tram/train interchange is being built, but in this case there would have been no trams east of Haymarket along Princes Street to St Andrew Square in the city centre, even though the most of the tracks for this section have already been installed.
Councillors were also told that continuing with the most ambitious option left on the table, which would have taken trams not merely to St Andrew Square but also on to Leith, could not be costed or scheduled with any certainty.
After several hours of debate, they voted in favour of a Liberal Democrat motion to keep the Princes Street section, but to terminate the service at St Andrew Square, which will cost some £770 million. Since so much work has already been done, including building a depot at Gogar and acquiring 27 trams, outright abandonment would have cost only about £20 million less.
The Haymarket-only option would have needed £700 million, which would still have been well over the last official budget of £545 million.
The project is running three years late, having been mired in a spiral of rising costs and lengthy disputes between the council's development company TIE and the main tramway contractors, Bilfinger Berger. Mediation talks began in March, and are understood to still be in progress.