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the Johnstone's View Index
Johnstone's View 19th
December
I was always led to believe that, ‘the road
to ruin was paved with good intentions’. So it would seem
when it comes to making changes to the rail timetables
between Aberdeen and Edinburgh.
While today we see growing demand for rail
travel and new proposals for investment in the lines,
through most of my lifetime the railways have been a dying
industry for which managed decline was the only perceived
option. The so called ‘Beeching’ cuts of the late 1960’s
were designed to shrink the network back and concentrate on
the lines where people still wanted to travel. By applying
this rule, the shortest and fastest rail route between
Aberdeen and Edinburgh was closed down and the tracks were
ripped up meaning that anyone wishing to make the journey
would have to cross the Tay bridge and make the ‘grand tour’
of Fife before then crossing the Forth bridge to Edinburgh.
This problem was further exacerbated by the
fact that many of the trains leaving Aberdeen can still make
very good time as far as Dundee. While the trains to Glasgow
then progressed making as few as two further stops before
their destination, those crossing into Fife seem to change
their status by becoming local trains stopping at every
station along the route. In addition, the route of the line
in Fife seems to be designed to connect as many small
communities as possible, taking the long way round and
making the historic ‘kingdom’ seem even bigger than it
really is.
The other difficulty of train scheduling of
course is that, as we all know, a train will go more quickly
between two points if it does not make any stops along the
way. However, if the train does not stop, then how are
passengers expected to access the service? Yes, I am aware
that the technology exists to load and unload a train while
moving at high speed but so far as I am aware this practice
has only been successfully used with mailbags. I am
confident that even the most resilient rail passenger would
tire of the process after a while.
It seems we can have inter city services
transporting passengers at speed from Aberdeen to Edinburgh
with only a few stops along the way or we can have local
trains which stop at every station. Up till now, the trains
on this service have had to do both jobs, leaving some
passengers frustrated. That’s why the new Scot-rail winter
timetable contains some fairly radical proposals to separate
these two responsibilities and speed up rail services to the
northeast leaving everybody happy, or so you might have
thought.
When word of the new time table began to
emerge, I had concerns expressed to me that the number of
trains between these two cities may be reduced and the times
of some of these services would be significantly changed. I
was then surprised to discover that there is also hostility
in Fife where the trains from Aberdeen will in future make
only a very limited number of stops and an increased number
of local services will run instead. When Fife MSP Marilyn
Livingstone raised this matter in the Scottish Parliament
with the Transport Minister last week, I took the
opportunity to ask Stewart Stevenson if he was aware of the
level of discontent in the northeast over these timetable
changes and whether he has had any contact from passenger
groups on the matter.
In response he defended that changes
claiming he had not been made aware of any dissatisfaction
with the new timetable but concluded by saying, “However, if
issues remain that people feel I should resolve, I would
certainly wish to consider them at the next available
opportunity.”
It would seem that, between them, the
Scottish Government and First Scotrail have designed a set
of timetable changes that are not universally popular with
either intercity customers or Fife commuters. This
timetable came into effect on Monday morning leaving some
passengers confused and disappointed. We do however have a
commitment from the transport minister that he wishes to
consider the views of rail users at the next available
opportunity.
I have already passed him some of the
correspondence I have received and will continue to do so.
It may be that some rail users will welcome the changes and
that others will have been unaware of it before Monday but
if you have a view I would be grateful if you would pass it
on to me and to the Transport Minister for his
consideration.
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