Hell on wheels

SCOTRAIL IS UNDER FIRE FROM THE PUBLIC OVER INTOLERABLE TRAVELLING CONDITIONS. HERE, VICKY ALLAN TAKES THREE JOURNEYS ON THE MOST CRITICISED ROUTES TO DISCOVER JUST HOW BAD THINGS HAVE GOT

THINGS don’t look good for ScotRail. Latest figures show that trains on one-third of routes are late more often than they are on time. Figures also show that at stations like Arbroath, Glasgow High Street and Ardrossan Harbour only 10 per cent are running on time.

It has also emerged that the Dutch company Nederlandse Spoorwegen, which owns ScotRail operator Abellio, admitted Scotland’s trains are run for the benefit of commuters in Holland.

Documents show the contract is used to make healthy profits on “limited investment”. The boss of Nederlandse Spoorwegen said passengers in the Netherlands must benefit from the firm’s work overseas – and there were calls for the deal to be scrapped and the rail service returned to public ownership.

All this makes terrible reading for passengers, but perhaps the worst they have to endure is the hiked prices and rush-hour crush that is causing commuter misery across Scotland. Despite long-running outcry by commuters on Scottish social media, there is no published data that gives us a measure of how bad overcrowding is. Scottish Labour wants to see figures published.

Scottish Labour transport spokesperson Neil Bibby said: “Passengers are being kept in the dark about the scale of overcrowding on Scotland’s trains.”

Bibby says figures are regularly published for England. “The SNP claimed this was a world-leading deal for Scottish passengers. SNP Transport Minister Humza Yousaf needs to ensure that overcrowding is monitored and reported on a regular basis as a matter of course from now on. Passengers deserve as much information as possible.”

To investigate just how bad Scotland’s trains are for commuters, in the last week the Sunday Herald travelled on some of what – on social media at least – are described as the worst lines, and talked to passengers. What emerged from journeys on just three troubled lines – Glasgow to East Kilbride, Edinburgh to North Berwick and Linlithgow to Edinburgh – is a tale of overcrowding, cancellations, long queues for tickets, broken ticket machines, and reduced carriages on trains.

A traveller on the North Berwick line into Edinburgh described Scottish trains as a “third-world service”. Gerry Quinn, a user of the East Kilbride line declared: “There’s been a lot of talk in the press about Jeremy Corbyn not being able to get a seat and having to sit on the floor, but you couldn’t even sit on the floor on these trains. There’s no room.”

PLATFORM 11, Glasgow Central Station, is crowded enough at 6.18pm on a Wednesday to merit a long train, but what pulls up is a two-carriage train. Passengers grumble the train used to be four carriages long until just a few months ago. There’s a rush when the doors open and it is soon standing room only. The aisle fills up, then the doorwell, with the bodies of weary commuters who would all rather get a seat for the ride home. “It’s a standing joke,” quips one passenger perched on the luggage rack looking up from his tablet.

“No pun intended. It’s just annoying when you’re standing up for the whole of the way home at the end of a long day, particularly if you’ve been standing up all day.”

The East Kilbride line is one of a number of commuter routes that throw up the complaint of “short-formed services”: trains which were once four or more carriages, now cut down to two or three.

Barry Smith, a social-media campaigner who retweets complaints under the #scotfail hashtag, tells me he believes ScotRail “knowingly and regularly under-provide services for people”. He cites “over 200 people being served tickets in Glasgow by only two people”, broken and unusable ticket machines, “smartcards that are smarter than the untrained staff who don’t have the training to use or validate them”, and “constantly cancelled trains leading to mass over-crowding”.

On the 6.18pm to East Kilbride, Nishal Paneandee stands wearily in the crowded doorwell. “I feel frustration,” he says. “I pay for a season ticket and it doesn’t feel worth what I’m shelling out for it. Trains cancelled – for whatever reason, usually signal problems. First thing in the morning, you’re trying to get to work and it’s hard to see why they have so few carriages. I come in from Clarkston and it’s packed by the time I get on.”

Further down the carriage, Carol Campbell looks glad to have got a seat at a table. “Poor and unreliable,” is how she describes the service. “It seems like the service has decreased since Abellio took over. More and more people are having to stand.”

Some say they try to avoid using the services if at all possible. Quinn says the “service is not fit for purpose any more ... You’re squashed in. You can’t get up and down the aisles. If there was an accident people would have no chance. I’ve seen people not being able to get off the train, because it’s so jampacked they can’t get to the door. ”

On two occasions, Quinn says, he has seen people passing out, and his wife has seen a third.

East Kilbride MSP Linda Fabiani is keeping a watchful eye on complaints. She says: “The inadequacy of the single-track rail line from East Kilbride to Glasgow Central has long been a concern, but the lack of carriages on peak-time trains has made the commute unbearable for many travellers. East Kilbride is the largest town in Scotland, and this line goes straight through the commuter belt into the city – two carriages is ludicrous. People are being left on platforms, having to stand all the way and sometimes even leave the train early because the overcrowding is so intense that they feel ill.”

ScotRail Abellio managing director Phil Verster acknowledges there is overcrowding on some lines, before outlining future plans: “We have a massive programme to address overcrowding and we are now close to getting the receipt of our Class 385 trains. They arrive in August/September of next year.”

Currently, he notes that there are around 800 carriages in service, and in the next two-and-a-half years around another 200 will be added. Verster said that by the time of the timetable change in May 2019 “we will have 24 per cent more capacity. It’s gigantic”.

That change is almost a year away. What is being done to get more carriages onto the East Kilbride line now? Verster says: “We’ve put every possible train we have available into service ... The East Kilbride line would see benefits as we start to get new fleets arriving.”

For many, though, a year is too long to wait – particularly when it means squeezing, day after day, into uncomfortable, and, many believe, dangerous

You’re squashed in. You can’t get up and down the aisles. If there was an accident people would have no chance