How do you improve the patronage of a station which has virtually nothing around it?
It's a different scenario to what was done to Broughty Ferry and Monifieth, for example. Dalwhinnie is effectively just a Highland Breich. It shouldn't close, but it wouldn't exactly suffer being omitted from a few services each day. At the very least, making it a request stop wouldn't be a terrible idea, as it keeps the links to the station open, whilst allowing services to pass through the majority of the time.
The fact that it has no significant settlement immediately nearby doesn't mean it has "virtually nothing around it".
I'm not an expert on Dalwhinnie. But I don't think you can say there are no opportunities to improve patronage. Some things that come to mind that are at least worth thinking about - it's in a national park with walking and biking opportunities straight out of the station. It's got the tourist attraction of the distillery next door. The current timetable sees 3 or 4 hours between trains. A service with that frequency is really only any use to people making longer journeys - maybe folk who live 15 mins drive away would use it when they are making journeys south or perhaps train times might happen to work for a day trip to Inverness. But that kind of service is pretty useless for - say - someone who lives in Inverness and might fancy a day out mountain biking, or an ascent of Ben Alder. You are committed to getting back to the station for a particular service - if you miss it, you might have to wait 4 hours. If the weather closes in you might turn back early but not early enough to get the service previous to the one you planned. An hourly service changes that scenario completely. Likewise - would tourists consider stopping for a visit to the Distillery, on their way from Edinburgh to Inverness by train? Unlikely at the moment for the same sorts of reasons, and again, something that would be different with an hourly service.
If patronage has been in decline for some time - who was using it before? Maybe changes in the area mean that demand has genuinely disappeared. But I'd always want to see what came first - a reduction in service, or a reduction in (apparent) demand.
As a principle, I think we should always be resisting any attempts to reduce services or close stations, because the history of our railways is that so much has been lost, that would be so useful today, because services and routes were given up based on short term or downright dodgy analysis. Once it's gone it's gone, generally. A closed Dalwhinnie station would probably never reopen.
No objection to the idea of a request stop. In fact I'd see a service where all trains were requests stops as better than the current one where a very few trains stop and the rest whizz through.
By the way I'm always curious about how request stops affect timings. Is it the case that you bank on the train only having to stop at one or two of a string of request stops, and then work out your timings on a kind of expected average over the whole lot? In other words, should it happen that the train has to stop at them all, it would be behind schedule?
