I used to think most people in Scotland rarely travelled by train, wedded to the convenience of their cars despite decades of government attempts to persuade them otherwise. But while it is true that the overall proportion of all journeys by rail remains tiny - just 2 per cent compared to half by car - I was taken aback by its popularity in some areas of the country when I saw a ScotRail presentation on Friday. It turns out that folk in East Renfrewshire are Scotland’s most enthusiastic rail travellers, nearly one third of whom take a train at least once a week. Even more surprising to my mind is that only 6 per cent of people there never travel by train. That’s about double the Scottish average for train use, and about two thirds less than the no rail travel rate, of 17 and 16 per cent respectively. By contrast, in areas with fewer stations and less frequent trains, the picture is very different, with just one in 50 Perth and Kinross residents taking the train at least once a week while nearly one third never do. As ScotRail’s strategy and planning director Scott Prentice, who presented the figures to the Scottish Association for Public Transport’s annual meeting in Glasgow, observed: “There’s a myth out there we need to convert people to use rail. “No, we don’t - they’re using us, they’re just not using us often enough. So it’s about frequency of use - that’s how we grow our business.” Mr Prentice pointed to some of the fastest growing areas, including Fife, where he said reliability improvements and the reopening of the Levenmouth line had helped increase passenger numbers by more than half to 3.5 million over the last year. Subscribe today to the Scotsman’s Transport newsletter Numbers travelling on the Glasgow to Ayr, Ardrossan and Largs lines were up by one third to 7.1 million, assisted by some 135,000 travelling to the Open golf in Troon last July In fact, Mr Prentice said ScotRail only had to start talking about improvements for patronage to increase, which he said had “put rail at the front of people’s minds”. As for the fastest growing stations, some have soared past pre-pandemic highs, even if ScotRail overall has still to achieve that. These include Kennishead, on the south side of Glasgow, whose numbers were up one third on a decade ago to 90,000 even before its total more than doubled again in 2024-25 to 185,000. That’s been put down to passengers temporarily switching from the nearby East Kilbride line during its closure for electrification, as well as new housing. The fastest growing was on another adjacent line, at Williamwood in East Renfrewshire, where passengers more than doubled for the same reasons to top 400,000 last year, although they were previously below pre-Covid levels. Other rising stars are on the secondary Edinburgh-Glasgow route via Shotts, thanks to new and more frequent trains, with Curriehill handling nearly 200,000 passengers in 2024-25 - more than three times as many as ten years ago. Livingston South and Kirknewton on the line also saw big growth. But all that doesn’t get away from the fact the network is hugely expensive to run, requiring £800 million a year of government funding. So if you pay tax and are among the 17 per cent of non-travellers, you might want to try taking a train.