One of the services discussed (the 17:15 Kyle of Lochalsh to Elgin) is actually a timetabled Monday to Saturday service, combining the last train of the day out of Kyle with a useful and generally well-used mid-evening connection between Inverness and Elgin.
I was slightly surprised that this wasn't part of ScotRail's response, and couldn't understand the relevance of the response quoted. Unless there has been a big rebuild at Inverness in the last few months, you can't turn trains there - it's not a triangular layout. I rather wonder if that was the answer to a different question!
While I wouldn't always rely on Wikipedia(!) its definition in ths case is what I had always understood - "A Parliamentary train or Parly (also referred to as a ghost train) is, nowadays, a British English term for a train that operates a Parliamentary service - that is to say a token service to a given station, thus maintaining a legal fiction that either the station or, in some cases, the whole line is open, although in reality the train operating company has almost completely abandoned the station or line."
If the operator does have other genuine motives, such as route knowledge, I am not clear whether such a service really counts as a Parliamentary train at all.
Generally, this suffered from the usual sloppy journalism and inadequate research. Why spoil a good story by checking facts?
It wouldn't have been too difficult to find out how to pronounce Breich either...
