Are there enough stations on the Glasgow to Edinburgh train line? A lot of the talk over the years has been about how efficient the service is and whether the line between Scotland’s biggest cities is fast enough. But another question is whether the service is properly linked to the communities along it. What’s the point of a train if you can’t get on it?

That was effectively the question a group of campaigners put to the Scottish Government this week when they made a (not easy) pilgrimage to Holyrood. The town they live in, Winchburgh, is expanding rapidly (used to be 2,000; expected to be 14,000 within ten years) and yet the public transport is terrible. There’s no direct link to Glasgow, the only link to Edinburgh is a bus that’s slow, unreliable and not that cheap, and even though the town sits on the main rail line, there’s no station. All they can do is sit and watch the trains whizz by.

To prove their point, the campaigners took the bus to Holyrood to deliver a demand for action and when I joined them on the trip it was obvious what the problems are. Two of the folk I spoke to, Amy and Jennifer, told me the bus usually takes at least 45 minutes but that it’s often more. A car would be quicker but you’ve got to find a space and pay for parking. So the best choice by far would be the train. Problem is: there isn’t one.

As it turned out, our bus trip on the day did take quite a bit longer than 45 minutes because there was heavy traffic and roadworks; door to door, it was well over an hour. What that means in practice is a lot of people just end up taking their cars, but as the MSP Sue Webber pointed out when we got to Holyrood, cities are making it harder for cars. There are low-emission zones, Edinburgh council is still threatening a workplace parking tax, parking is expensive, the roads are in a poor way, and on it goes. “People deserve a train station,” said Ms Webber.

The bigger point here, however, is that the case for a station isn’t just an argument for people who live in Winchburgh. Yes, it would make commuting to Glasgow and Edinburgh easier, but it’s also likely it would be used by people across a much wider area. What’s more, an independent study commissioned by the developers concluded a station would take around 500,000 cars off the major Central Belt motorways every year, which, as every MSP I spoke to at Holyrood pointed out, would help the government meet its (now scaled back) climate change targets.

And so why isn’t the government doing it? For a start, it would be a relatively easy job - the developers have created much of the infrastructure that would be needed, Network Rail have earmarked £4.5bn to invest in the railways, and the Edinburgh Glasgow Improvement Plan and electrification which Transport Scotland said was a block to a new station is now finished. Which leaves the Scottish Government as the only real hurdle.

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When I asked them this week what the problem was, they effectively pointed the finger at the developers. In principle, they said, the government is supportive of a new station – and it makes sense: new ones are opening up all over Scotland (Reston, East Linton, Levenmouth, etc, etc) many serving smaller populations than Winchburgh would. But the government also said the developer would have to accept responsibility for a significant part of the costs of a new station at Winchburgh and that the project would have to be “developer-led”.

Now, the first bit about money makes sense, but then the developers have never denied they’d be paying a significant part of the costs; what’s confusing is the stuff about the station being “developer-led”. I spoke to the CEO of Winchburgh Developments, John Hamilton, and he made two points. First, a developer has never led such a project in this way, it’s never happened; and second, the government is asking the developer to do something which is impossible because they’re not a transport authority. “We do not have the authority to build a station,” he said. Fair point, no?

To try to get my head round it on the day, I asked everyone I spoke to what they made of the government’s position and there was general mystification. Graham Campbell, who chairs the community council, said the government was introducing rail links in smaller communities, so why not them? I also couldn’t help picking up a suspicion that perhaps the government thinks Winchburgh is well-off and that people who live in nice new houses generally have two or three cars in their driveways so why not use them to get about? In other words, maybe there’s a bit of inverse snobbery going on, in which case it’s blinding the government to the bigger economic and environmental benefits.

The CEO John Hamilton’s theory was that it all comes down to a reluctance to spend public cash, but in this case there are good reasons to do so. Obviously, the people of the town would feel the biggest benefit, but it’s also about looking at the rail network and asking what it’s actually for. Do we try to connect more communities to it, or is that too much trouble? Do we keep building places that rely on cars, or do we do something else? For the moment, the Scottish Government seems reluctant to provide answers, but the hope must be that in the end – as so often happens with this administration – logic and facts will defeat them.