THOUSANDS of Scottish commuters will have their daily journey times between Glasgow and Edinburgh slashed as a result of a multimillion-pound scheme to transform one of the country's slowest rail lines.
Officials are studying a £35m plan to speed up the Glasgow Central to Edinburgh service, which currently takes 95 minutes and stops at 19 stations, if it runs at all.
A limited-stop service, running in parallel with the existing one, will introdu
ce new trains running every hour which stop at just four key stations and cut 35 minutes off the journey.
It is hoped that the scheme, expected to be in place by 2007, could eliminate as many as 300,000 car journeys along the M8, and eliminate the line's reputation as one of the grimmest commutes in Scotland.
But despite the bold claims, ministers and officials have been accused of doing little more than "patching up" Scotland's creaking rail infrastructure.
Critics claim the plan is unambitious and Scotland should settle for nothing less than a Glasgow-Edinburgh bullet train and extra stations.
The plan has been produced by a group of local authorities including West Lothian Council and Edinburgh Council, and will be funded by the Scottish Executive.
The new service would stop at Livingston South, West Calder, Shotts and Uddingston in addition to Edinburgh and Glasgow.
That would leave the other 14 stations on the line to be serviced by the existing connection, which will continue.
The project will cost an estimated £35.4m over five years. The cash will be spent on £10.7m of line upgrades to avoid the new service being held up by freight trains. In addition, the service will need £4.7m a year from the Scottish Executive to subsidise the cost of rolling stock.
It is hoped that boosting services from Glasgow Central will encourage more people living in the south and southwest of the city to take the train.
At present, anyone taking a suburban service into Glasgow and then wanting to travel on a fast train to Edinburgh must walk from Central to Queen Street, a journey of between 10 and 15 minutes.
For many, the only real alternative is to drive, exacerbating the huge congestion on the M8, the main route between the two cities.
A study produced by the Glasgow-based transport consultants FaberMaunsell concluded that the extra services would cut the number of miles travelled by drivers in central Scotland by about seven million a year.
Observers believe the project is almost certain to get ministerial backing because the line goes through a number of constituencies represented by Labour MSPs and MPs.
One Labour MSP said: "The feeling is that it's about time our areas had something out of this deal. The Liberals have had their way on the Skye Bridge tolls and the Borders rail, but we just wonder what exactly we get out of this whole thing."
But while the prospect of an improved service has been welcomed, opposition MSPs claim the plans will do little to deal with the basic problem of Scotland's ageing rail infrastructure.
They point to the fact that proposals for an Edinburgh-Glasgow bullet train have come to nothing despite years of discussion, and to "missing links" such as the lack of a station in central Livingston and even in St Andrews. Furthermore, the faster service will still take an hour to link two cities 47 miles apart.
Fergus Ewing, the SNP transport spokesman, said: "While no one can argue with improvements to services, all the normal European nations have train services which are frankly superior to ours. We have a train infrastructure built for the 19th century, and it cannot cope with the extra frequency of services needed."
But Bristow Muldoon, Labour MSP for Livingston, backed the plans.
He said: "This is an upgrade which would improve things for a great number of people at a relatively modest cost. Many of my constituents would greatly value the faster connections to Edinburgh and Glasgow which this service would bring."
A spokesman for the train operator First ScotRail said: "These are interesting proposals and we look forward to working on them with partners in the industry."
A Scottish Executive spokeswoman said: "The plan is under examination, and there are issues still to be resolved."
