Fast bucks for the rail firm fat cats… slow going hell for long-suffering passengers
By Graham Grant
OUR destination was so tantalisingly close that we could have got out of the carriage and walked to the station in a couple of minutes.
Instead we sat stock-still, or occasionally mustered a few mph, just yards away from Haymarket, on a train running close to 40 minutes late.
Gamely, the announcer attempted to explain the problem – something technical to do with an axle – which had caused untold chaos on Scotland’s busiest rail commuter route.
Obligatory apologies followed; indeed, regular passengers will be all too familiar with the mournful automated voice echoing around station concourses: ‘We are sorry to announce that the 08:15 is delayed by approximately six minutes.’
This is usually something of an optimistic guesstimate: it’s not uncommon for a service that is supposedly delayed to vanish altogether from digital departure boards.
The week began badly after a line fault caused rush-hour chaos between Glasgow and Edinburgh yesterday, and there were more delays and cancellations on services across the West of Scotland.
The spirits of wearied rail-users are unlikely to have been lifted by the disclosure at the weekend that the salary of ScotRail’s highest-paid director is £286,000 a year – more than the combined earnings of Theresa May and Nicola Sturgeon.
In the best interests of transparency and accountability, Abellio, the Dutch firm which runs ScotRail, won’t say who their biggest earner is, or indeed what they’ve done to deserve it.
Was it their big idea, for example, to shrink the size of tables in new carriages to roughly the size of a small pocket handkerchief?
It’s nothing less than an obscenity that anyone at the top of this most dysfunctional of organisations should be picking up a pay-cheque on such a stratospheric scale when the rail system is in a state of near-constant turmoil.
Very few of us care, frankly, whether a delay or cancellation is the fault of ScotRail or Network Rail – we just want to get to work on time (or indeed just get there), preferably without braving the dreaded replacement bus.
Perhaps our unnamed fat cat came up with that other great ScotRail wheeze – ‘smartcards’, proudly emblazoned with a Saltire, which were meant to rid us of antiquated paper tickets.
In fact, ScotRail staff openly despair of this innovation, as often the tickets uploaded onto cards don’t show up on their hand-held scanners, even if they’ve managed to get the customer through the barriers.
You also need to load your ticket onto the card online ‘at least four hours’ before travel; the alternative is to use station ticket machines to try and get the ticket onto the card, but the results are variable.
Sometimes the process appears to ‘crash’ halfway through, leaving you unsure whether any cash has been deducted.
A total of £1million was divided up between smartcard customers by ScotRail recently in a last-ditch giveaway to kick-start interest in the failing product, money that could have been invested elsewhere (perhaps on a new automated voice that doesn’t sound quite so despondent).
Nor is it cheap, however you pay, with a return ticket from Edinburgh to Glasgow now costing more than £26; and yet the trip takes about as long as it did 50 years ago, even with the new electric trains which promise to slash journey times to 42 minutes.
Travelling first class on this route can add about £20 to the ticket price, though on a recent journey I spent much of my time hunting for a plug socket, which also eluded the man in charge of the drinks trolley.
What’s more, the door wouldn’t shut, ensuring every decibel of nearby drunken yells could be savoured in the first-class carriage – maybe they were just happy because they’d managed to find a seat.
The refurbished InterCity 125 trains got off to a bad start during a media launch when a train showcasing the high-speed trains on the Aberdeen to Edinburgh route broke down – caused by a driver whose over-zealous use of the horn apparently caused an air leak that knocked out some vital functions.
Ironically, they can only manage 100mph – unlike the top speed of 125mph back in their 1970s heyday – and the Transport Salaried Staff Association has accused ScotRail of bringing back ‘Dad’s Army’ trains.
The 125 trains in use in Scotland are ‘reconditioned’ – pressed back into service despite having been discontinued elsewhere.
Meanwhile Transport Secretary Michael Matheson has gone very quiet indeed, shunning the high social media profile of his predecessor Humza Yousaf.
This should worry us because when Mr Matheson was in charge of the justice system he was more or less invisible – and while he remained silent the hierarchy of the single police force imploded.
In this context, the continued silence of this unimpressive minister is deeply ominous.
It is now beyond question that placing your faith in the rail service in Scotland to make an appointment you absolutely can’t afford to miss is utterly inadvisable: either walk, drive, or travel the night before.
Not that it’s any easier for motorists, forced to navigate between craterous potholes and at every turn confronted by roadworks in ceaseless ‘upgrades’ that never seem to produce any tangible dividend.
The £1.3billion Queensferry Crossing was trumpeted by the SNP as an extraordinary endeavour on a par with the Moon landing, and yet motorists have had to endure 143 separate lane closures since it opened last year.
Snagging works have dragged on long beyond the bridge’s official opening in August 2017 – eight months later than first estimated.
And yet, like that ScotRail executive enjoying their anonymity as much as their pay-packet, the political class moves around with comparative ease, in vehicles they don’t have to maintain or refuel.
In 2016, official figures showed that Scottish Government ministers made almost 100 journeys of less than half a mile in taxpayer-funded limousines in the space of a year.
The most frequent route was between the Scottish parliament and St Andrew’s House government building – a walk of less than ten minutes.
Despite vowing to ‘make the train an even more attractive alternative to the car’, Miss Sturgeon took almost 600 trips in taxpayer-funded limousines in her first 15 months as Infrastructure Secretary, a post she held while also acting as Deputy First Minister.
This was doubtless because the unreliability of rail infrastructure is such that to depend upon it for urgent government business is out of the question – everyone else, of course, will just have to put up with it.
For once Miss Sturgeon and her ministers – perhaps even Mr Matheson if anyone can find him – should ditch their limousines and tough it out with the rest of us, on filthy cramped carriages or by pothole-ridden road.
And if they are held up, they could always use the time productively to craft heated social media messages to ScotRail – perhaps even demanding their own resignations. There would be plenty of retweets.
