Last month (November 2024) I attended a reception at Edinburgh Castle where we heard from First Minister John Swinney. Even with the increase in online meetings there are still occasions when business is better done in person. This was such an occasion and that’s a reality for everyone living and working in the Highlands – trips to the central belt are sometimes essential – for both business and leisure.
To hear the First Minister, I travelled by train. When I moved to Inverness in 1997 that train journey normally took 3h 20 minutes. Last week each leg of my journey to Edinburgh took 3h 46 minutes. And that was with both trains running on time. Twenty-seven years of progress has seen our trains get slower. How can that be? Where is our outrage and why are we not hearing from Scotrail on a regular basis with their improvement plans?
It took 49 minutes just to get to Aviemore from Inverness – a trip that can be made in 35 minutes by car. Trains are safer and a good step towards net zero. But to encourage more people to use them they need to be consistently more comfortable, have reliable power points and Wi-Fi, and a good standard of catering – my return journey failed on all three of these. They also need to be significantly faster than driving, and affordable.
My trains were both running and on time. That doesn’t always happen and Scotrail have just announced that there will no trains for four weekends in a row from the middle of November. And of course, the train services north of Inverness are even worse.
The very welcome investments we’ll see from the Freeport will lead to even greater pressure on our road and rail network and neither of them are coping at the moment.
The cost to business of our slow and outdated rail services is very real and to my knowledge there are no plans for serious reductions in journey times. Come on Scotrail – when are you going to take our rail services seriously?