The long-running saga of the missing passenger shelter roof at Muir of Ord Station prompts reflection on the projects being adopted in various UK cities, including Leicester, Sheffield and London, to install 'Green Roofs' on bus shelters. In built-up areas every little bit of extra greenery helps to maintain the vital bee population, as well as cooling the air in the shelter beneath and filtering out pollutants. The shelters have a Polyfelt blanket, overlain with 30-40mm sedum^* vegetation mats. Utrecht in the Netherlands pioneered using the unused space on top of bus shelters for added bio-diversity. By 2019 they had over 300 bus shelters featuring green roofs. [Below]

Network Rail has a large number of these shelters and it would be a useful and pleasing project to have them replaced with green-roofed structures.

The roof on the shelter at Muir of Ord was blown off in February 2022 and currently passengers have a fine view of the (sometimes) blue sky if they look up. The good news is that at the end of November Network Rail had quotes in for the work to replace the shelter so by the time this is published it should have been done.

^*Sedum is a large genus of flowering plants with water storing leaves in the family Crassulaceae, members of which are commonly known as stonecrops.