Train cuts are ‘insulting joke’

Deareditor

It was concerning that in the local elections only one political party’s leaflets appeared to show any awareness of the impending cuts in connectivity and service levels for rail passengers using Dunblane station and, to a lesser extent, Bridge of Allan.

As a daily commuter from Dunblane and regular user of rail for leisure, I am hugely disappointed that Scotrail’s new timetable beginning on May 16 means: no more direct trains from Dunblane to Aberdeen or Inverness on weekdays; having brought in electric trains for most Dunblane-glasgow services in 2018, all such services now return to being operated by dirty, 30/45-year-old diesel trains and journey times to Edinburgh going back to pre-2018 lengths as stops at Polmont and Linlithgow are added again.

Passengers from

Dunblane who want to travel to Aberdeen or Inverness must now travel on a local train to Perth or Stirling and wait about 30 minutes for a connection. How is this progress?

Scotrail will tell you, of course, that reducing stops at intermediate stations saves time on longer journeys. Except it doesn’t. Overall Glasgow-aberdeen/ Inverness journey times are virtually identical to now. What happens to the time saved by not stopping at Dunblane?

It’s called “dwell time”

- the Intercity train sitting frustratingly in Perth or Dundee sometimes for up to 12 minutes, according to publicly available working timetables.

For example, the 1035 Stirling to Inverness, which currently stops at Dunblane, now flies straight through so it can sit at Perth for seven minutes. The 1814 Stirling to Aberdeen, another Dunblane stopper since time immemorial, now sits at Stirling for 3½ minutes and at Perth for a further five, seemingly smugly ignoring Dunblane for the sake of it. A stop adds about three minutes overall to a journey; Scotrail could still save minutes and stop at Dunblane.

The pandemic has clearly hit Scotrail hard, witnessed by its being taken back into public hands. But it needs passengers to return and for journeys to be made easier, not harder.

It needs to become greener - and make us greener, too - and running diesel trains under electric wires is simply lazy and backwards.

This new timetable is nothing short of an insulting joke for the railway users of Dunblane who want to travel any sort of distance and makes a mockery of the Scottish Government’s pretence of making the country more environmentally friendly.

Fraser Boyd Dunblane