Ah, the romanticism of the railways. Late trains. Reduced timetables. Standing in the aisle for want of a seat. I wonder why more people don’t travel by train?

That is the question that must be addressed, following Scottish Government transport secretary Fiona Hyslop’s announcement that a pilot scheme to do away with peak time fares was being discontinued. It saw fares standardised across the day, paid for by the Scottish Government, and it did increase passenger numbers by 6.8 per cent, but that fell disappointingly short of the 10 per cent increase needed for the scheme to pay for itself.

Looked at purely on that basis, you can have sympathy with the cash-strapped Scottish Government’s predicament, but the abandonment of the scheme is still a depressing moment which makes it feel as if our hopes of a sustainable, futuristic transport system are slipping away.

The vision for modern, low-carbon, interconnected transport for Scotland is decades old. By now, carbon emissions were meant to be plummeting downwards. We were meant to be cycling with joy in our hearts on well-maintained cycle lanes to our newly reopened local stations, hopping on onto affordable state-of-the-art electric trains, settling into plush seats, connecting to fast and reliable rail wifi, and celebrating how much more spare cash we had to spend on our healthier lifestyles now that we’d dumped our cars.

It hasn’t quite turned out that way. It still could of course – that’s the thing about visions – but the fact that fares........

© Herald Scotland