Scotland’s leading independent courier firm was forced to introduce emergency contingency plans to ensure deliveries were able to continue as usual in the wake of last week’s M8 motorway closure.

Eagle Couriers, which employs 100 people between Edinburgh and Glasgow, revealed that it had to implement the measures to avoid the traffic disruption caused by a major diesel spill on the M8 on Friday.

Jerry Stewart, a director at Eagle Couriers, said that the firm faced a huge challenge to ensure that tenders worth in excess of a million pounds continued to be delivered.

He said: “This kind of incident is the ultimate horror situation for us. We deliver a lot of important packages every day between Edinburgh and Glasgow – including blood samples, legal documents and sensitive information – so it is vital that we guarantee these deliveries arrive on time.

“We carry out sensitive deliveries for large companies such as BT and the NHS and it would have caused them major disruption and extra costs if we had not been able to maintain our service.

“Thankfully, we planned for this kind of scenario and had suitable contingency plans in place. Using alternative modes of transport such as the train network, we were able to ensure that we were able to carry out all our deliveries without disruption.”