Furious row over GBR's red, white and blue colours at Glasgow Central is a depressing sign of our times

Great British Railways branding like this on the main concourse at Glasgow Central station was temporarily displayed on ticket gates at the ScotRail-run low-level station | Contributed

It was a trivial error: contractors working for one rail company had mistakenly put its branding on part of a station run by another one. No biggie, surely?

So it seems strange that the chief executive of Transport Scotland herself, Alison Irvine, reportedly “hit the roof” on seeing the livery of the new Great British Railways on the lower level of Glasgow Central Station, run by Scottish government-owned ScotRail, rather than just the main bit, run by UK-wide Network Rail.

No less a figure than Network Rail chief executive Jeremy Westlake ended up calling her to say sorry and then emailing an allegedly “grovelling” apology. Transport Scotland’s director of rail reform Bill Reeve apparently also got involved, with a source saying he made his views “very clear to Network Rail over how sensitive it was”.

But why so sensitive? Might it be something to do with GBR’s red, white and blue colours? Dear, oh dear. Network Rail confirmed the apology but denied it was “grovelling”. This is pure speculation but, reading between the lines, we suspect a better description might be a ‘mildly patronising, flirting-with-sarcasm placation of overly thin-skinned Scots’.