Belfast’s Glider to run north to south from spring after £75m extension

Belfast’s Glider rapid-transit system will run from Glengormley in the north to Carryduff in the south from April, the Department for Infrastructure confirmed on Tuesday, completing a cross-shaped network that was first proposed in 2008 and whose second line has been promised by four successive ministers.

The £75m extension adds 11 miles of route, 32 halts and 18 of the articulated, 18-metre hybrid vehicles that have operated the east-west line between Dundonald and the Falls Road since 2018. The north-south line will use the Antrim Road, Royal Avenue, the Ormeau Road and the Saintfield Road, with a bus-only section through the city centre where private cars have been banned since 2023.

The department said the first vehicles had arrived at the Translink depot in Newtownabbey and that driver training on the route would begin in January. The service will run every seven to eight minutes during the day and is expected to carry 25,000 passengers a day in its first year.

The existing line carries 36,000 passengers a day and is credited with a 17% rise in public transport use across its corridor. The second line has been slower, delayed by the collapse of the Stormont executive in 2022, by a legal challenge over the removal of 240 parking spaces on the Ormeau Road and by the cost of rebuilding a bridge over the Lagan at Ormeau that engineers found could not take the vehicles’ 30-tonne weight.

“North and south Belfast have waited eight years to get what east and west got, and for most of that time the explanation was that there was no money and no minister,” said Geraldine Hughes, who chairs the Belfast Chamber of Commerce. “This will put 90,000 people within a 10-minute walk of a service that actually turns up.”

Traders on the Ormeau Road, where works have closed lanes for 18 months, were less enthusiastic. Paul McGrath, who runs a butcher’s shop near the Ormeau Park gates, said takings had fallen by a fifth during construction. “I will believe the passengers when I see them. What I have seen is cones,” he said. The department said all road works on the route would be finished by the end of November.

The north-south line will stop at the Mater hospital, the Royal Victoria hospital’s new maternity unit and Queen’s University, and the department said it had agreed with the Belfast Health and Social Care Trust to adjust shift patterns for 3,000 staff to match the timetable.

A third phase, a spur to the airport at Aldergrove, remains unfunded. The infrastructure minister said the department’s priority after April would be a Glider link to the Titanic Quarter, where 8,000 people now work with no rail or rapid-transit service.