Why the new ScotRail minimum fare is unfair for passengers

I only discovered a couple of days ago that ScotRail are introducing a minimum fare of £10 for tickets bought on the train, except when you've boarded at a station where there is no ticket office open and no ticket machine available.  I've been thinking about how that will actually work in practice at my nearest station of Cumbernauld.  

I don't use it very often because it's an hour's walk from where I live, but I've used it maybe half-a-dozen times over the last year, including when I went to the SNP conference on Saturday.  Every single time I've been there recently, the ticket office has been shut.  There is a ticket machine, but to the best of my knowledge there's only one, and it's on the opposite platform from the main entrance.  That means if you were getting the train to Falkirk or Edinburgh, you'd have to make an otherwise needless trek over the bridge and back - which I can tell you on Saturday morning was a pretty treacherous trek because of ice.

Now, it may be that common sense would apply and the minimum fare wouldn't be imposed on journeys from stations like Cumbernauld because of the special problems.  But passengers aren't mind readers, and on a technical reading of the rules they might well make the pointless crossing of the bridge, even if they have a disability.  To even put the thought in people's minds that they may have to do that is, I would suggest, pretty poor.

There's also the problem that if you feel forced to use ticket machines, they're not always very easy to navigate and you may, through no fault of your own, end up with a ticket that is not technically valid for your journey.  Last summer I had to take a train from London to Portsmouth, but for the ticket to be valid for the journey it had to specify that I was not going via a particular station (I can't remember which one).  The ticket machine simply refused to offer me the right sort of ticket, and I couldn't find a ticket office.  In desperation I bought the wrong ticket just to get through the barriers, and thankfully the conductor took pity on me and pretended not to read the ticket very carefully.

Of course the main inconvenience of the minimum fare is that it leaves you with a dilemma if there's only a minute or two before the train leaves - do you take the time to buy the ticket in advance if it means you might miss the train?  It's needless hassle like this that makes you feel like rail travel just isn't worth the bother and it might be better to stick to buses.