ScotRail's Ridership Surge Hides a Genuine Question Inside Its Headline Number
Scotland's state-run rail operator recorded 48.4 million passenger journeys between April and September 2026, a 55% increase since public ownership began in 2022 and the highest growth rate among large train operators in Great Britain.
Between April and September 2026, ScotRail recorded 48,419,573 passenger journeys — a 7% year-on-year increase of 3.1 million trips and a 55% jump since the franchise returned to public ownership in April 2022. According to the Office of Rail and Road, the growth rate was the highest among large train operators in Great Britain — a distinction that raises the obvious question of what, specifically, is driving it.
The immediate answer is a half-year packed with events that produce discretionary rail travel at scale. Edinburgh’s festival season, the Commonwealth Games, and a run of major concerts pushed the rail network hard enough that its single busiest week — 26 July to 1 August — handled 2.1 million journeys, according to Deadline News. That is a short-term driver, and when you strip out the event spikes the baseline picture is still healthy but less headline-grabbing. The question worth watching is whether a year without a Commonwealth Games and the Edinburgh festival calendar holds up at the same level.
The longer-term explanation is structural. In September 2025, Scotland permanently removed peak fares across the ScotRail network — a policy that, per ScotRail’s own announcement, had been trialled and then made permanent rather than left as an experiment that could expire. The effect is not identical to simply cutting prices: it flattens the cost curve across the day, meaning commuters who were previously priced into travelling at awkward early-morning times, or not travelling at all, now face the same fare whether they board at 7:30 am or 10 am. That kind of price-signal change tends to produce step-change demand shifts rather than gradual ones, and the 55% surge since 2022 — a period that also includes the post-COVID ridership recovery — is at least partly the compound effect of that policy over its first full year.
The public-ownership framing matters here too, though not for the reasons either side of a privatisation debate might prefer. ScotRail was brought under the control of Scottish Government-owned ScotRail Trains Limited after the previous franchise holder, Abellio, had its contract terminated early. The move was not ideological so much as pragmatic — Abellio had consistently underperformed, and the government decided direct control was the least-worst option. Four years on, the numbers are better than anyone projected when the franchise changed hands; whether that is because the economics of public ownership are inherently superior or because the removal of peak fares happened to coincide with an event-heavy travel calendar is a different question entirely.
The 55% figure is the one that reads as most striking, but it is also the one that deserves the most context. It is a 55% increase since a point — April 2022 — that was itself shaped by the tail end of pandemic-era travel restrictions. A rail network climbing out of a deep trough can post dramatic percentage increases without the absolute numbers being on the same scale as pre-pandemic levels; a 55% rise from a depressed baseline is not the same achievement as 55% growth over a five-year period of healthy ridership. None of that makes the numbers unimpressive — 48.4 million journeys in half a year is a substantial figure by any measure — but the headline percentage tells you something about the trajectory more than it tells you about where the system actually sits in historical terms.
What the ORR comparison does establish, though, is relative performance. If ScotRail is growing faster than every other large operator in Great Britain — and the regulator says it is — then the question is not just whether Scotland’s railway is doing well in absolute terms but why it is outpacing the rest of the network. Peak fare removal, direct state control, and a particularly strong events calendar together offer a plausible explanation; separating those three variables cleanly will take another few seasons of data. For now, the railway is banking riders at a rate that would have seemed improbable four years ago, and the people running it have at least one summer’s worth of numbers to show for it.