We are in this mess because of the laws that we have in place. The owner of the hotel was, as far as I can tell, doing everything perfectly legally and indeed rationally from his perspective. If we don't want this situation to happen again, then we are going to have to change the laws. The reason we aren't rushing to change the laws is really the fact that there is no financially and politically free option to fix this. Either the state, through some mechanism (whether that be NR funding or heritage bodies or the council or someone else) would have to cough up for the cost of maintaining the building and preventing it falling down and blocking the railway, or we have to loosen our rules on listed buildings and make it easier for owners to knock down their buildings. When we're in such dire economic straits the logical answer really is the second one, but people don't like facing cold, hard reality. When there are people genuinely trying to list Cumbernauld Town Centre you can see how active demolition of a Victorian station hotel would be unpopular.
In the end, we've lost the hotel anyway, but just at an enormous societal cost. Demolishing it upfront would have annoyed a small number of people for a relatively short period of time. Not demolishing it has meant that a much larger number of people have been annoyed for a much longer period of time. Was it really politically better to go this route? Every little problem we create in the name of immediate political expediency ends up making us all worse off in the end.