The question is,
why is it lightly used. Certainly, low population levels in the area mean it's never going to sustain a metro frequency, but from what I've read and seen, it does seem that part of the reason for it being lightly used is that the far north line hasn't seen the investment required to enable a decent service to run on it, while possibly at least some investment has gone on roads instead. Personally, I do appreciate that investing in the Far North line is going to give a poor return compared to - say - investing in some commuter line in the middle of Glasgow or somewhere. But I also strongly suspect that with appropriate investment, the line would become much better used. And I think in the long term, that would be worth while because the advantages of rail over road make it a near certainty that rail will become more important over the coming decades (assuming the Government is at least vaguely sensible in its transport policies). Plus of course all those well-rehearsed social issues. And I feel very confident that if we did allow the Far North Line to close, then in about 30 or 40 years time, we'd be almost universally bemoaning why we allowed that to happen and how now we've got to rebuild the line from scratch again to provide decent connectivity for the area.
Looking through it, it seems to me that the main problems are:
- Between Tain and Golspie, the service takes an hour to cover an as-the-crow-flies distance of about 15 miles, without serving anywhere of significance en route. Building that Dornoch link should, if done with good linespeeds, be able to shave about 40 minutes off journey times, with the bonus of actually serving a couple of reasonable-sized places in between too.
- The diversion to Thurso adds nearly 30 minutes to journey times to Wick. Presumably you could fix that by having the through train go to just one of the two places, with a guaranteed connecting shuttle at Georgemas Junction (or at Halkirk if that bit of line was rebuilt). Since the Shuttle would be running almost completely isolated from all other routes, reliability ought not to be an issue, and there should be few operational problems with having the shuttle wait for late-running Inverness trains to guarantee connections. That could be another 25 minutes knocked off Wick journeys
- Sorting out the reasons why the timetable has had to be slowed down over the last 15 years ought to save another 10 minutes.
- And you could probably get a few more minutes by closing a couple of stations that have almost no patronage.
Do all those and you've saved maybe an hour and 10-15 minutes on Inverness-Wick times and maybe 45 minutes on Inverness-Thurso times. Add in a bit of infrastructure to give timetable robustness and my guess is you'd now have a much better used line that can seriously compete with cars on journey times. Indeed you might then have enough passengers to justify a couple of additional trains per day, which would make the line even more attractive as a journey option. Perhaps with that scenario, a long-term ideal would be a straight 2-hourly frequency?
Add to that - obviously you also want the infrastructure to allow a regular hourly service from Inverness at least as far as Dingwall. Again, that should pull a few more people off the roads.
I appreciate that this would cost a lot, and some people are going to question the cost vs numbers of people benefitting, but I would suspect in this case, the social/etc. benefits to a very remote area, and the wider environmental/economic benefits of taking people out of cars for journeys that may in some cases continue south of Inverness would make it worthwhile.