Here’s a picture taken by CRAG member Paul Tetlaw at Waverley Station in the summer of 2020 following relaxation of the travel rules.
It shows a Borders Railway train just arrived at Waverley – clearly a large number of passengers were unable to buy a ticket on the train as Scotrail guards were not selling tickets or even doing on-train ticket checks, so they are having to pay at the station.
To Paul this says there must be a significant amount of ticketless travel taking place during the Covid-19 pandemic. So, the published figures for rail travel during the recovery period are probably well below the actual numbers of people travelling.
Paul accepts that commuter travel was very much depleted but leisure travel recovered pretty well and will surely do so again once the pandemic is over.