I welcome the opportunity to debate the rail services connecting the Highlands with the central belt. We all want improved services, and I have enjoyed listening to the contributions to today’s debate, but postulating the situation as a choice between rail and road would be a profoundly wrong misconception. We must have decent, fair and safe road connections, something that is taken for granted in the central belt.

On Monday 15 September, two more people lost their lives on the A9. Our thoughts are with their families; those who lose loved ones in that way and before their time are devastated for ever. According to the Road Safety Foundation, death is three times more likely on single-carriageway roads than on dual carriageways and 10 times more likely than on motorways.

The Cabinet secretary has heard me making those points time after time after time. I know that the debate is about railways, but many speakers have mentioned roads, and I hope that it is in order to ask the cabinet secretary to indicate, in her response, when this autumn the promised statement about funding will be made and when there will be confirmation of the details of the dualling. Industry sources have told me that it can be done earlier than the projected revised target date of 2035, and, with a capital budget of around £5 billion a year, there is no shortage of money to do it in that time.

One way in which there could be big improvements would be to increase the amount of rolling stock and improve its quality by increasing the number and comfort of carriages. I want to refer to a Constituency complaint—a profoundly serious one—that I received recently and which I am pursuing with ScotRail, which has not yet replied even though I contacted the company on 22 September.

On Sunday 21 September, a party of brownies and guides numbering 60 in all was travelling back to Inverness from a trip to Dynamic Earth. They had booked seats but, when they got on the train, there were no reservations. My constituent wrote:

“by the time the girls got their suitcases on there was NO seats. the doors shut ... the girls were all standing. We managed to get some to sit on the floor as they were ... feeling faint due to the squashing. We were all standing but making the most of it - assuming folks would leave at Perth”.

However, that did not happen. Instead,

“LOADS of people pushed onto the train ... standing on girls, pushing them out of the way, one girl was almost pushed off the train and was grabbed by a leader ... it became terrifying and ... dangerous”.

Girls were physically sick and fainted, were

“asleep on the floor”

and

“were overheating, it was like a third world travel experience.”

I could go on. It is an outrageous example of a complete failure to provide a service.

I wrote personally to every executive at ScotRail—by snail mail, so that they could not deny that they had got the letters. I have not heard from any of them. They are all well paid; they have job titles whose functions seem to overlap. Goodness knows what they do.

I wanted to use my time, which is drawing to a close, to say that, in the short term, we must see a proper, fair and decent service—and that, certainly, an apology from the chief executive and chair of ScotRail is overdue.