During the past few years Edward Gibbins has related the events surrounding the closure of some railway lines, notably those on the Isle of Wight and over Stainmore Summit, where they were so obviously candidates for withdrawal of their passenger services – they either would be much better served by buses or else ran through very sparsely populated areas with little chance of attracting additional custom for any mode of transport. Nevertheless not all closures fell into these categories and a series of three, all affecting different sections of the same route, comes to mind. The first of these serves to illustrate Edward Gibbins’ contentions and is the subject of this article. With the Editor’s permission the other sections will be dealt with in separate articles.
Eventually closure of the route between Leuchars Junction and Tayport became inevitable, given the minimal level of service on offer over what had been an integral part of the East Coast Main Line although it had not been a meaningful part of it for almost 70 years. A very full description of the whole of the route appeared in Backtrack as long ago as 1999 but before looking at the events which preceded the withdrawal of passenger services it will be worth a brief reprise of how and why the line came into being.
We need a railway
The River Tay originates in Loch Tay in Perthshire and eventually reaches the sea to the east of the city of Dundee although long before the Roman invasion there had been ferries over the Tay, the last one finally ceasing to operate as recently as 1966. A proposal for a railway between the Forth and the Tay had been made in 1819 but nothing came of it, nor again in 1836. A third attempt came in October 1840 with the first Prospectus for the Edinburgh & Northern Railway (E&NR) being published in April 1844; this failed to raise the necessary amount of money meaning no Parliamentary Bill could be submitted. Nevertheless the company did eventually obtain an Act which specified a double track railway and allowed it to purchase the ferry at Tayport. An agreement with the Dundee & Arbroath Railway (D&A) allowed E&NR traffic to use the D&A route between Broughty Ferry and Dundee.
Opening and operation
The line opened as far as Cupar on 20th September 1847 with four trains either way per day – through travellers went by road coach from Cupar to the Tay until 23rd May 1848 when the line was opened to Tayport. Here passengers transferred to an open boat for the crossing to Broughty Ferry – goods wagons crossed the river by steam ferry. In 1878 the railway was extended to the new Tay Bridge and became part of the North British Railway (NBR).
