THE departure board called it the 13.53 from Waverley to Inverness.
But on Sunday, it was more like the last helicopter out of Saigon.
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The six-carriage train scheduled to make the three-and-a-half-hour journey had broken down, so all ScotRail could find was one half the size.
Result? Carnage. People who’d booked seats couldn’t get near them, every inch of aisle and corridor was crammed with bodies and luggage.
Kids were crying, old folk were struggling to stay upright, everyone was fuming.
All this for a bargain-basement single ticket costing just £55.20.
This scenario was painted for me by a reader who emailed in yesterday morning.
And there couldn’t have been a timelier snapshot of what a mess Scotland’s infrastructure has crumbled to.
Because for our Holyrood-run railway, this chaos wasn’t the exception to the rule; no, it’s almost BECOME the rule, with more than 6,000 services cancelled in the period since an 8.7 per cent fare hike back in April.
UTTER BRASS NECK
In other words, our SNP government are making an almighty mess of running a vital transport system, but they still want us to pay more and more for the privilege of using it.
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Or not, depending if your train actually turns up.
In fact, wait, there’s more. There’s the utter brass neck these Nat Controllers displayed in not only going back on one of their few decent policies of recent times — the scrapping of hugely-expensive peak-time fares — but blaming this on you and I for not taking them up on the offer often enough.
It’s never their fault, though, is it? I mean, the fact that you and I would love to relax on a train rather than slogging through traffic but choose not to seeing as ScotRail are so bloody unreliable doesn’t seem to compute with them.
It never does, not when it comes to trains or council services or schools or hospitals or any of the other vital cogs of Scotland’s machinery that they’re messing up on a daily basis.
If it’s not you or me who’s let them down, it’s Thae Terrible Tories or the two-faced Greens or a big boy who did it and ran away.
Well, it seems that — at long last — today’s the day when they start getting a proper taste of their own medicine. The day when a new Labour government in Westminster points the finger right back at John Swinney, at Humza Yousaf before him and Nicola Sturgeon before him and say: THE MESS SCOTLAND IS IN IS YOUR FAULT.
Don’t get me wrong, the bad news from both Prime Minister Keir Starmer and their Scottish leader Anas Sarwar will still be that it’s the ordinary taxpayer who has to pick up the tab.
As Starmer warns of more UK-wide economic pain before things start to improve, Sarwar will publish a dossier homing in on what he calls “the current financial crisis engulfing the SNP government”. In other words, Things Can Only Get Worser.
But at least someone’s finally addressing it. After a decade and a half of the Nats whistling a happy tune while the country goes to pot, at least we’re being told the painful truth.
Don’t know about you, but I’d much rather know just how bad things were than be patronised and — let’s face it — lied to by the kind of chancers we’ve had in charge up here for way too long.
All those chancers have ever done is buy votes by giving stuff away free, make expensive promises they can’t possibly keep and hope against hope that by the time the tally man knocks THEIR door that they’re already long gone from power.
Labour aren’t allowing them to get away with it that easily.
They want the world to know, as if we weren’t already aware of it, just how lousy a job Sturgeon, Yousaf, Swinney and the rest have made of our finances, just how much of our taxes — the highest in Britain, remember — they’ve flushed straight down the lavvy pan.
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Yes, there’s an element in there of Starmer and Sarwar doing exactly what the Nats have done before them by passing the buck; It’s no’ us, it’s them.
Difference is, though, this time it’s the truth.
