THERE is to be free wifi at Scottish railway stations.
Passengers will also be able to get online while they are on line in a train. This will change the face of rail travel as we know it. (In my case, when there were steam locomotives on the Saltcoats service.)
Passengers making their way home from a hard day in Edinburgh where the jobs are will no longer relax by gazing at the sunny uplands of North Lanarkshire. Or the dappled foothills of the West Lothian Munros. Bings as they are known.
They will be catching up on emails, poring over spreadsheets, or writing an impact study on a one-size-fits-all solution to stakeholder engagement disfunction in the office environment.
Passengers not actually working will be online cheating on the answers to the Herald crossword. Some will be on Facebook telling friends: "I'm on the train." Or, "I'm at the station. Wish I was in Starbucks because Dr Beeching closed the buffet in 1963."
Most worrying is the effect wifi culture would have had on our great railway movies. Brief Encounter would never have happened. Alec and Laura would not have moped about on platforms. Having checked each other out on the eHarmony dating service, they realised they were incompatible.
The Railway Children might have ended badly when police found photos of Roberta in her red underskirt on the Old Gentleman's laptop. And anyway disaster was averted when a passer-by used a smartphone to warn of the landslide on the railway line.
Forget Murder on the Orient Express. Hercule Poirot tried to book his ticket online but it was too confusing so he flew with Ryanair instead. Hitchcock's The Lady Vanishes was cancelled because the TalkTalk broadband service was down again.
Planes Trains and Automobiles was never made as a film but you can read all about it on Trip Advisor. There were problems with the script of Von Ryan's Express. A search on an ancestry website revealed Colonel Ryan was related to Hermann Goering on his mother's side.
Plans to film Trainspotting were abandoned after an online petition by nearly a million anoraks who protested there was little or no reference to locomotives in the script.
The documentary about the night mail train was cut short. Narrator John Grierson only got as far as: "This is the night mail crossing the Border, Bringing the cheque and the postal order, Letters for the rich, letters for the poor, The shop at-" because WH Auden only had 140 characters when he wrote the poem on Twitter.
Why are you making commenting on The Herald only available to subscribers?
It should have been a safe space for informed debate, somewhere for readers to discuss issues around the biggest stories of the day, but all too often the below the line comments on most websites have become bogged down by off-topic discussions and abuse.
heraldscotland.com is tackling this problem by allowing only subscribers to comment.
We are doing this to improve the experience for our loyal readers and we believe it will reduce the ability of trolls and troublemakers, who occasionally find their way onto our site, to abuse our journalists and readers. We also hope it will help the comments section fulfil its promise as a part of Scotland's conversation with itself.
We are lucky at The Herald. We are read by an informed, educated readership who can add their knowledge and insights to our stories.
That is invaluable.
We are making the subscriber-only change to support our valued readers, who tell us they don't want the site cluttered up with irrelevant comments, untruths and abuse.
In the past, the journalist’s job was to collect and distribute information to the audience. Technology means that readers can shape a discussion. We look forward to hearing from you on heraldscotland.com
Comments & Moderation
Readers’ comments: You are personally liable for the content of any comments you upload to this website, so please act responsibly. We do not pre-moderate or monitor readers’ comments appearing on our websites, but we do post-moderate in response to complaints we receive or otherwise when a potential problem comes to our attention. You can make a complaint by using the ‘report this post’ link . We may then apply our discretion under the user terms to amend or delete comments.
Post moderation is undertaken full-time 9am-6pm on weekdays, and on a part-time basis outwith those hours.
Read the rules hereComments are closed on this article