#railwaystations — Public Fediverse posts

Saturday, April 25, 2026

https://activitypub.writeworks.uk/2026/04/saturday-april-25-2026/

Saturday, April 25, 2026

https://activitypub.writeworks.uk/2026/04/saturday-april-25-2026/

Saturday, April 25, 2026

https://activitypub.writeworks.uk/2026/04/saturday-april-25-2026/

Saturday, April 25, 2026

https://activitypub.writeworks.uk/2026/04/saturday-april-25-2026/

https://loops.video/v/c_nDmAo3Yr

#mifareclassic

#RailwayStations @Bahnhofsoma

#imagepipe @Billie

#pixelfed

#archlinux

#volumecontrol

#photok

#Adebar @IzzyOnDroid

#balancetheball

********

Exhibizion Berlin since 2020
Imagepipe
Pixelfed

Exhibition Dresden 2022
RailwayStations
Adebar
Balance the Ball

Exhibition Meissen 2023
Arch Linux

Exhibition Radebeul 2025
Balance the Ball

#loopsvideo

Monday, October 6, 2025

https://activitypub.writeworks.uk/2025/10/monday-october-6-2025/

Monday, October 6, 2025

https://activitypub.writeworks.uk/2025/10/monday-october-6-2025/

Monday, October 6, 2025

https://activitypub.writeworks.uk/2025/10/monday-october-6-2025/

Monday, October 6, 2025

https://activitypub.writeworks.uk/2025/10/monday-october-6-2025/

#Chepstow Railway Station, #Wales

I found one of those maps which shows an area's historic buildings and for the station it has, in part:

"The single-storey buildings on the east-bound platform are constructed in stone and timber, in an Italianate style. They were completed in 1850 for Isambard Kingdom Brunel's South Wales Railway."

#RailwayStations #TravelPhotos

For some reason I seem to have a lot of photos of railway station platforms :D

This is #Castlemaine, in #Victoria in 2010.

#RailwayStations #TravellingPhotos

Tuesday, August 5, 2025

Massive Ukrainian drone strike targets Russian railway station in Volgograd Oblast — Pokrovsk is the city of my childhood. Now I watch it die — Ukrainian soldier working as Russian ‘mole,’ sending GRU military positions — Zelensky says mercenaries from Asia and Africa fighting for Russia in northeastern Ukraine … and more

https://activitypub.writeworks.uk/2025/08/tuesday-august-5-2025/

Tuesday, August 5, 2025

Massive Ukrainian drone strike targets Russian railway station in Volgograd Oblast — Pokrovsk is the city of my childhood. Now I watch it die — Ukrainian soldier working as Russian ‘mole,’ sending GRU military positions — Zelensky says mercenaries from Asia and Africa fighting for Russia in northeastern Ukraine … and more

https://activitypub.writeworks.uk/2025/08/tuesday-august-5-2025/

Tuesday, August 5, 2025

Massive Ukrainian drone strike targets Russian railway station in Volgograd Oblast — Pokrovsk is the city of my childhood. Now I watch it die — Ukrainian soldier working as Russian ‘mole,’ sending GRU military positions — Zelensky says mercenaries from Asia and Africa fighting for Russia in northeastern Ukraine … and more

https://activitypub.writeworks.uk/2025/08/tuesday-august-5-2025/

Tuesday, August 5, 2025

Massive Ukrainian drone strike targets Russian railway station in Volgograd Oblast — Pokrovsk is the city of my childhood. Now I watch it die — Ukrainian soldier working as Russian ‘mole,’ sending GRU military positions — Zelensky says mercenaries from Asia and Africa fighting for Russia in northeastern Ukraine … and more

https://activitypub.writeworks.uk/2025/08/tuesday-august-5-2025/

Tuesday, August 5, 2025

Massive Ukrainian drone strike targets Russian railway station in Volgograd Oblast — Pokrovsk is the city of my childhood. Now I watch it die — Ukrainian soldier working as Russian ‘mole,’ sending GRU military positions — Zelensky says mercenaries from Asia and Africa fighting for Russia in northeastern Ukraine … and more

https://activitypub.writeworks.uk/2025/08/tuesday-august-5-2025/

🇫🇷 Une photo de ce matin pour vous dire bonsoir! 🙂

A photo from this morning to say good evening! 🙂

#earlyMorning #nightphotography #photographieNocturne #amateurphotography #railway #railways #RailwayStations #gares #spoorwegen #Eisenbahn #Eisenbahnbilder

🇫🇷 En gare d'Arlon ce matin... Mercure accompagne les voyageurs. 🙂

Il y avait un petit rayon de soleil (timide) visible sur le reflet dans les vitres.

Matériel visible ici : voiture pilote I11 en tête d'une rame de voitures du même type + 1 voiture I10 avec compartiment vélo en queue, poussée par une locomotive série 13. La face avant de la voiture pilote est identique à celle de la machine.

Voiture pilote M6 en tête d'un segment de voitures M7 pour l'écolage du personnel. Certains trains de la série 21xx (Luxembourg - Bruxelles - Luxembourg) devraient être assuré en M7 à partir du changement d'horaires le 15 décembre prochain.

🇬🇧 Arlon station this morning... Mercury accompanies passengers. 🙂

There was a small ray of sunlight visible on the reflection in the windows.

Visible here : DVT of I11 coaching stock with a rake of I11 cars + one I10 (with Bicycle space) at the end and is pushed by an electric locomotive class 13. The face of DVT is identical to the class 13 locomotive.

A DVT of M6 stock with a rake of M7 stock for staff schooling. Some trains of the Luxembourg - Brussels - Luxembourg InterCity service will be operated by M7 Stock from next timetable change on Dec. 15.

@trains #trains #railways #railwayenthusiast #gares #RailwayStations #spoorwegen #Eisenbahn #Eisenabhnbilder #CheminsDeFer #SNCB #RailPhotography #railwayphotography #architecture #architecturephotography

🇫🇷 Se morfondre et ressasser ne servent pas à grand chose... alors j'ai décidé de revenir au train-train quotidien (elle était facile, j'en conviens!).

Retour en février 2003 en gare de Tamines sur la ligne 130 Namur-Charleroi, ancienne ligne du Nord-Belge, (dernière compagnie ferroviaire à avoir été intégrée à la SNCB et plus tôt que prévu par suite de la guerre) se prolongeant par la 130a vers Erquelinnes, Jeumont. C'était l'axe international Liège - Paris avant que les TGV ne balaient tout sur leur passage...

Le bâtiment de la gare est pratiquement identique à celui de Virton-Saint-Mard, c'est la première chose qui saute aux yeux de l'amateur. Le bâtiment a été rénové et repeint de nos jours.

La première photo me permet en outre d'illustrer une page d'histoire ferroviaire : à gauche du train de droite, on voit un signal avec une rosace lumineuse; c'était l'IOT (Interrupteur Opération Terminées). A chaque gare équipée, le chef-garde devait, après avoir fermé les portes et s'être assuré que tout était en ordre, aller actionner un boîtier qui allumait une lampe centrale rouge, 8 secondes après, la couronne blanche s'allumait et le chef de train, au premier quart de roue du train (sic!) pouvait fermer la porte de laquelle il avait fermé toutes les autres. Cette procédure n'existe, heureusement, plus aujourd'hui, la digitalisation étant passé par là et offrant de surcroît plus de sécurité au personnel roulant! Vous pouvez imaginer la frustration qui peut naître lorsque le signal de sortie de la gare n'est pas ouvert et que vous êtes là avec une porte ouverte mais devez refuser (verbalement uniquement), l'accès au train à d'éventuels usagers qui se présenteraient encore.

🇬🇧 Even if days like yesterday are difficult to manage, despair and sadness won't help... So, I decided to go back to some normality and what a better way to feel better as getting back in time through photos?

My stuff are trains! (You already know it!), so back in February 2003 in Tamines on the railway Namur-Charleroi (line 130) which was part of the Nord-Belge railway until 1940. It was the last private company to be integrated in SNCB/NMBS and earlier as foreseen because of WWII. The line goes further as 130a to Erquelinnes and Jeumont. This was the railway used by international trains from Liège to Paris before HST went and chased all "classic" trains.

The station building is practically identical to the one in Virton-Saint-Mard. It's obvious to the rail enthusiasts and especially if you come from Saint-Mard! In the meanwhile, the building has been renovated and repainted nowadays.

The first photo gives me the opportunity of talking of an historic momentum in the railway history. Nowadays, the guard, which is Train-Manager also, gives departure in a very secure environment thanks to digitalisation but in that time, the old technique "IOT/AVG" was still in use. You can see a small box with a ring of white lamps, that's the IOT/AVG. The guard had to close all doors except one and go to the platform to turn a box with the key to give information that the train was ready for departure, and then go back on the train, after 8 seconds, the red lamp alighted by turning the key, became that white ring and when the train began to move, only then the guard could close the last door! You can imagine how dangerous it can be if the signal shows red and you must wait with a door open but you must refuse possible passengers coming late to get aboard!

Pour aller plus loin/For more about those topics :

➡️ https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compagnie_du_Nord_-_Belge

➡️ https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gare_de_Tamines

➡️ https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indicateur_Op%C3%A9rations_termin%C3%A9es

#throwbackthursday #souvenirs #railway #RailwayStations #eisenbahnbilder #bahnbilder #railways #trains #gares #railphoto #amateurphotography #photography #photographie

Har vært hos pappa på Levanger i dag, og slang innom stasjonen. Fin i regn også den. Arkitekt: Paul Due (ikke sønnen Paul Armin Due). Åpnet: 1902. #RailwayStations #arcitecture @aslakr

Yesterday, we went on a trip to #Penzance in #Cornwall. There is a direct #RailwayLine running from here to #London #Paddington. My local station is about half way along this 6-hour route and I’ve been on the London leg many time and so I thought it would be nice to go to the end of the line in the other direction. There are lots of #RailwayStations with strange names, like #Lostwithiel and #StErth and so it was nice to pass through them on our way.

Yesterday, we went on a trip to #Penzance in #Cornwall. There is a direct #RailwayLine running from here to #London #Paddington. My local station is about half way along this 6-hour route and I’ve been on the London leg many time and so I thought it would be nice to go to the end of the line in the other direction. There are lots of #RailwayStations with strange names, like #Lostwithiel and #StErth and so it was nice to pass through them on our way.

Yesterday, we went on a trip to #Penzance in #Cornwall. There is a direct #RailwayLine running from here to #London #Paddington. My local station is about half way along this 6-hour route and I’ve been on the London leg many time and so I thought it would be nice to go to the end of the line in the other direction. There are lots of #RailwayStations with strange names, like #Lostwithiel and #StErth and so it was nice to pass through them on our way.

Yesterday, we went on a trip to #Penzance in #Cornwall. There is a direct #RailwayLine running from here to #London #Paddington. My local station is about half way along this 6-hour route and I’ve been on the London leg many time and so I thought it would be nice to go to the end of the line in the other direction. There are lots of #RailwayStations with strange names, like #Lostwithiel and #StErth and so it was nice to pass through them on our way.

1905 – Former Railway Station, Newcastle, Co. Down
The first terminus of the Belfast and County Down Railway (BCDR) opened their line south from Downpatrick in March 1869, but the current building dates from a 1905 remodelling when the Great Northern Railway of Ireland arrived here from Banbridge. The station at Newcastle is a
https://www.archiseek.com/2024/1905-former-railway-station-newcastle-co-down/
#ArchitectureOfDown #1905 #CoDown #GreatNorthernRailway #Newcastle #RailwayStations

Illicit goings-on beneath the New Town setts: the thread about the life and crimes of the Scotland Street Tunnel

Scotland Street, on the northern firnge of Edinburgh’s Second or Northern New Town; not the grandest or longest such street, but certainly one of the more interesting. But what draws me to it is what you cannot see – the 1,052 yard long tunnel running a few tens of feet beneath its granite setts. Previous threads have looked in detail at the construction, engineering and operation of the tunnel, its terminus at Canal Street Station or tragic accidents during its service life. No, as the title suggests this story is about the various criminal goings-on that it attracted in its short service life from 1847-1868.

Things start getting going in our story in February 1858 when an urgent telegram arrived at the Leith Police station with a description of a man wanted in Aberdeen for thefts and who had fled that city on the steamer Sovereign, bound for Granton.

Two detectives were despatched from Leith to Granton station which was adjacent to the steamer quay. Here they managed to identify their mark but instead of clapping him in irons then and there, they boarded the same compartment on the Edinburgh train as him, and only announced themselves to him once they started heading south towards Scotland Street.

They made the suspect “aware of his predicament” but did not handcuff him. At Scotland Street Station their train was detached from the locomotive and attached to the haulage rope which would pull it up the tunnel incline to its destination at Canal Street. With a jerk, the train moved off into the darkness – there was no carriage lighting.

So you can imagine the look of surprise on the detectives’ faces when they emerged into the light at Canal Street Station only to find they were now alone in the compartment! Their man had somehow managed to slip silently out of the carriage in the pitch darkness of the tunnel! After alerting the railway authorities, the detectives trudged off back down the tunnel to search Scotland Street Station. On arriving there and interrogating the staff, it was found that a porter had seen a man emerging from the tunnel who had climbed over a fence, never to be seen again. The police had to be consoled in retrieving their suspect’s luggage, in which the items he had been accused of stealing in Aberdeen were found.

You would think that police accompanying prisoners through the tunnel would have been more careful in future. You’d think, but they weren’t, and in January 1864 a prisoner by the name of Peter Brown managed to pull off the same trick. Brown, (aka John Graham, aka John Farrel, aka Robert Young) had been detained in Larbert a few days previously by Superintendent Gray for the crime of stealing a silver watch, a pair of trousers, a vest and a shirt from the house of Widow McKay in the High Street of Falkirk. He had been cooling his heels in Perth Prison ever since, but was now to be brought to Edinburgh for the purposes of identifying him for other offences. A single officer was to accompany him, who at least took the precaution of handcuffing him. They took the 145PM from Perth, which had to cross the Forth by steamer from Burntisland to Granton, before picking up the train again for the short ride into the city centre via the tunnel. Once again, an unlucky officer emerged at the Canal Street terminus without his charge.

He had actually noticed his prisoner missing while in the tunnel but groping around in the dark for him, all he had managed to do was to upset his understandably surprised fellow passengers. Telegraphs were sent off and the policeman ran off down the tunnel in pursuit. Half way back down, the prisoner’s cap was retrieved. Back at Scotland Street Station, a porter once again described seeing a man emerge from the tunnel before existing the station, never to never be seen again. Once again, the Police were left empty handed and with egg on their faces. The Stirling Observer expressed surprise that a felon who was so “peculiarly dull-looking” could have managed to outwit the authorities with such “a daring piece of cleverness.”

Thefts were common on the railway. That very same day that the fugitive from Aberdeen had given the Leith Police the slip in the tunnel – Friday 12th February 1858 – James Ross, “a perfect adept in the light-fingered art” plead guilty at the Edinburgh Police Court to pickpocketing eight half-crowns from a lady at the station the previous day; for his efforts he received 60 days hard labour. In July 1859, a woman travelling from Leith to Edinburgh was relieved of £6, 17s 3d from her purse by three “Cockney gentlemen” who joined her in a first class compartment at Bonnington Station and left again in peculiar circumstances at Scotland Street, loudly claiming to all in the carriage that they had bought the wrong tickets and wanted instead to go to Granton. The victim arrived at Canal Street to find her purse empty, and immediately gave a description to the Police. There was a problem with a “Swell Mob” of Cockney pickpockets in Edinburgh that summer and the Police knew where they liked to hang out in the howffs of the West Port. Detectives Youdall and Leadbetter were efficient in their duties, picking up Richard Myars in a “thieves den” before finding John Tonner and James Clark hiding under a bed in their lodging house in the nearby Grassmarket. They had £7 between them, despite previously pleading to the Police that they had insufficient funds to leave the city. For their troubles their £7 was given to the victim in compensation and each got 60 days in the Calton Gaol, before being run out of town.

In October of that year, a most unusual “crime” took place in the tunnel – the transport of illicit cookies! A Mr Nottman had bought six cookies from Mr Robert Young, the licensee of the refreshment rooms at Canal Street Station and was observed to do this by PC Donald Bain. Nottman and his cookies boarded the train for Scotland Street Station and was followed by PC Bain, followed in fact all the way to his house in Bonnington where he intended to eat said cookies. The consumption of the cookies “off premises” was a clear violation of the Forbes Mackenzie Act under which premises were licensed.

The Procurator Fiscal (in Scottish law, the Public Prosecutor), Mr Linton, was keen to enforce this particular act to the full extent of his powers and had Robert Young and Nottman sent before Sheriff Hallard to explain themselves. Despite a good defence by the solicitor Mr Rollo, WS, and good character references, the Sheriff said he had no alternative but to fine Young £1 5s for his crime of selling off-sales cookies (the alternative was 10 days imprisonment!); Nottman escaped with a ticking off. This was the third such conviction within a week in Edinburgh, on Friday October 7th, Bailie Cassels at the Police Court applied the same fine to David Doull of Princes Street for selling “a few penny tarts” and Mr Ridpath of the North British Railway refreshment room for selling “a number of muffins” for consumption off premises.

This was not the only time the railway found themselves on the receiving end of the Edinburgh Sheriff Court. On this day, November 29th, in 1861 the Edinburgh Evening Courant reported that Sheriff Jameson awarded 5 guineas damages to Mr Robert Riddel, a merchant of Blairpark, Ferry Road. The defendant in the case was the Edinburgh, Perth & Dundee Railway company which ran the Scotland Street tunnel. Riddel sued the Railway for their treatment of him on the 6th November when, after buying a 1st Class ticket from Bonnington to Edinburgh with friends, they found the carriages full so they sat instead in 2nd class. Riddel was annoyed that this sort of thing happened too often, and so at Scotland Street station he asked the ticket collector to refund him the difference. When the collector declined, Riddel kept hold of his ticket (he was meant to hand it in) and said he’d take the matter up instead at the Canal Street terminus with a higher authority. The ticket collector was having none of it, fetched the station master and the pair physically ejected Riddel from the train. He was “severely sprained in one of his hands” and detained against his will at Scotland Street before being refused a refund or onward transport. In finding for Riddel, the Sheriff set a precedent that passengers were entitled to a refund if they could not travel in the means which they had paid a ticket for due to a fault of the railway. Riddel let it be known that he was contributing his damages to the relief fund for the victims of the recent “Heave Awa Land” disaster.

Our last “crime” goes back to the previous year, a “laughable incident” that was widely reported in July 1858 under the tongue in cheek heading of “A Merchant’s Last ‘Stroke of Business’“. It involved an unfortunate but persistent woman of “prepossessing appearance“, one who ultimately had the last laugh. Our heroine arrived in Edinburgh from London in early July by steamer. Her purpose was marriage to “a commercial gentlemen belonging to this city“, their courtship having taken place by correspondence. She had with her all her possessions and with these boarded the train for Scotland Street where she was met by her lover.

“After many tender words were said” her fiancée went to retrieve her luggage from the van only to find it was empty. Both were astonished and after an hour of enquiries the man began to start having doubts about his bride and came to believe she was not whom she claimed to be. He imagined he was to marry a comfortably off woman, but now feared she had nothing to her name besides the clothes she stood up in. They had planned to be married then and there but he managed to put her off and “excuse himself” on account of his business arrangements. His jilted bride-to-be retreated back up the tunnel to the City to make more enquiries at Canal Street and find herself a hotel. From here, she sent word to her lover to please come and join her when he was done with work. But he never did. Distressed by her lack of spouse and lack of luggage, she returned to the station and was advised to take the train back down the tunnel to the steamer quay at Granton in case it was there. Imagine her surprise when at Scotland Street she saw all her belongings on the platform!

Disembarking from the carriage, she hurried up the stairs and down again to the other platform. To her horror she found not only her luggage but also her late fiancée, “waiting evidently to proceed on a long journey” and directing a porter to load her things onto a train for Leith! “He could make no answer when interrogated by the lady“, being “completely dumbfounded” at seeing her. In the most persuasive terms, she made him agree to “put off his journey” and marched him and her luggage back up the hill to Edinburgh and married him on the spot! His “business speculation over”, he instead was obliged to “retire to spend the honeymoon in the quiet seclusion of the country“.

The Scotland Street Tunnel soldiered on for a few years more but its new owners, the North British Railway, couldn’t wait to get rid of it when the acquired the Edinburgh, Perth & Dundee Railway. They built and opened a diversionary line and closed the tunnel on May 22nd 1868 with all traffic through it ceasing immediately. The tunnel spent the next 20 years doing nothing and was largely forgotten about, but popped up in the newspapers every now and again. Commander J. C. R. Johnston wrote to the Scotsman in April 1870 suggesting that it be used for horse carriages and carts, to bypass the gradients of the New Town, an idea still suggested for cycling and walking.

Ten years after closure Robert Kerr & Co., a whisky broker and blender in Leith, announced in the Scotsman that they intended to use the tunnel as a bonded warehouse for Wine and Spirits. Nothing came of this idea either. It would be almost another decade before a permanent use was found for the tunnel – from 1887 to 1902 the Scottish Mushroom Co. used it as an industrial-scale mushroom farm! Two tons of mushrooms a week could be harvested (when mould wasn’t killing them off).

The mushrooms grew on immense quantities of manure which was hauled straight into the tunnel by a steam engine on the old rails. Workers deep inside and working in the darkness with only the flicker of candles banked it up in huge piles as mushroom beds. The railway yard at Scotland Street was used as a manure transfer, storage and mixing depot. Horse manure was the main source – it came straight from Piershill Cavalry Barracks and also from the council’s manure depots where the “scaffies” deposited their collections.

The manure was mixed when it was at the peak of fermentation, resulting in “a strong effluvia aris[ing]“. As you can imagine this did not go down too well with the residents of Scotland Street and their neighbours. The city’s energetic Public Health officer, Dr Henry Littlejohn, was also alert to the danger it posed and had the midden relocated to Warriston, 500 yards from human habitation. After these initial teething troubles, the Scottish Mushroom Co settled down to business and once again the tunnel faded from popular consciousness. And that might have been that for our story had it not been for a rather amusing and farcical occurrence in 1889.

In November of that year it was announced that Arthur James Balfour, the Irish Secretary, was due to attend a banquet dinner of Unionists and Tories in the Waverley Market on December 5th.

Balfour was from the Maitland Balfour family of Whittingehame, East Lothian, and a distant relation of the Balfours of Pilrig and enjoyed significant local interest and popularity. The organisers could not find an establishment large enough to host the event and so had turned to the city’s covered fruit and vegetable market, with fully three quarters taken over for the banquet. The same could not be said of Balfour’s popularity back in Ireland where his ruthless actions against Irish Nationalists earned him the moniker “Bloody Balfour“. The authorities therefore feared the dinner at Waverley would be targeted by Nationalist reprisals and become “a modern Guy Fawkes“. They feared a bomb would be smuggled into the undercroft of the Waverley Market, or even worse, into the Scotland Street Tunnel itself. Such a device it was said “would extinguish Unionism and Toryism in Scotland perpetually” given “every member of any note” was to be present.

A significant police detail was therefore imported to provide protection for Balfour and the dinner, and set about combing the venue for signs of anything untoward. It is important to note that these were not local officers and so were naive about local matters. The police were able to obtain duplicate keys to the gates of the tunnel at its southern end, and entered to search. They neglected to tell the North British Railway what they were up to and set off down the dark tunnel with only a few lamps to guide them. The police didn’t understand what the funky piles along the tunnel were. They boldly pressed on down but their courage failed them when some of the men working the mushroom beds suddenly popped their heads up from behind the manure banks and enquired “Wha’s there?” The officers fled back up the tunnel and could not be convinced to return until it was explained to them what went on down there those days. A thorough search was made of the operation, but all that could be found was manure, mushrooms and the “spawn” used to sew the beds

The Evening News reported that “the mushroom men were left laughing both at the timidity of their visitors and the fruitlessness of their visit”. Balfour’s dinner passed off uneventful with a banquet for 3,000, “1,000 ladies in the galleries” and seats for 8-10,000 public spectators.

You may wonder why I’m writing about the Scotland Street Tunnel yet again. Well I do have an ulterior motive, as my learned friend Leslie Hills just so happens to have a new book out now about two centuries of life above ground in Scotland Street. Most conveniently, it’s out in all good bookshops and is launched on Friday 1st December! “10 Scotland Street – the story of an Edinburgh home and its cast of booksellers, silk merchants, sailors, preachers, politicians, cholera and coincidence“. If you are reading this and you like my threads about Edinburgh and Leith history, then you probably like going down the sort of historical rabbit holes and off on tangents, so you’re sure to like Leslie’s book too as it will take you from a door on Scotland Street and around the world! I find a pleasing symmetry that Leslie’s book details what was going on just a few tens of feet above the tunnel at the same time as the shennanigans I have just been relating to you were going on tens of feet below the people in her book. Be there! I was very honoured to be able to contribute in a small way to this book and am only too pleased to commend it to you too.

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This art let me bring together two of my very favourite things (cute public transit stations and putting lil guys in situations) and that made me so happy that I made it a print. Isn’t Maida Vale station pretty?

https://ko-fi.com/s/29e4c65a06

#londonunderground #cuteart #london #publictransit #watercolour #maidavale #railwaystations #npceo

I went on the #ElizabethLine for the first time today. Here’s the platform at #Paddington, looking a little bit #Tardis-like, I thought, what with the roundels.

#RailwayStations #PaddingtonStation #LondonUnderground #MonochromeMonday #BlackAndWhite #blackandwhitephotography #TheTube

I wonder if this bench in #Kemble station was basically one third built when they nationalised #GWR in 1947, whereupon it became part of the Western Region of #BritishRail.

The other benches in the station with the same design have the GWR logo on all three legs.

#Railways #Railway #RailwayStations #Nationalisation

Plan to reopen Cheshire station shut by Beeching axe approved

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-merseyside-67274902

#RailwayStations #ClosedStations #Reopening #Beeching #Cheshire #Beeston #Taporley

Forgotten Fatalities: the thread about the Granton railway disaster of 1860

Recent threads about the Scotland Street Tunnel and the Granton Breakwater inevitably involved me touching on the history of the railway that ran between these two places and brought to my attention a striking image of a forlorn-looking steam engine lying on its side on the Wardie foreshore. How this locomotive came to be here isn’t “in the books“, so of course I had to find out more.

The answer to this anomaly was that it was the result of an accident which took place on the Edinburgh, Perth & Dundee Railway‘s (EP&D) short section of track on the southern side of the Firth of Forth between Trinity Station and Granton Harbour. This event on the evening of Sunday 8th August 1860 would claim the lives of four people, injure six more and cruelly impact upon one family in particular.

The EP&D ran from its start at Canal Street Station (beneath and at right angles to what we now call Edinburgh Waverley), by gravity down the steep incline of the Scotland Street tunnel to a station of that name at its foot. Here, steam engines were attached to trains to haul them the few miles to Granton, via Trinity, or North Leith, via Bonnington. At Granton passengers could continue their journey onward across the Firth of Forth to Burntisland, by connecting paddle steamer. North of the Forth the railway carried on north to Perth and to Dundee (via a further steamer from the harbour at Tayport), explaining the full name of the company.

On Sundays there were usually there were only two passenger trains a day each way to Granton. On the day of the accident the 4:30PM from Edinburgh ran the three mile trip hauled by engine No. 32. At the terminus the driver detached his engine and shunted the carriages back into the platform to where it would later form the 8:10PM return journey. This pattern only took place on the Sabbath; Monday to Saturday there were sixteen trains each way and a much quicker turnaround was required, undertaken in a rather frightening manner known as “fly shunting” whereby the carriages were “slipped” (detached) while the train was in motion and a well-timed throw of the points directed the engine one way and the freely coasting train the other into the platform. The guard at the rear in the brakevan was responsible for bringing the train to a controlled halt by which time the engine was already in the process of re-positioning itself so it could re-attach at the front of the train and haul it back the way it had come.

There was nowhere at Granton for engines to wait for any period of time and so on No. 32 now returned the way it had come to while away the next few hours in the engine shed at Scotland Street. As it departed it began to pick up speed and ascend the gradient up to the embankment along the foreshore and parallel to Lower Granton Road. It crossed the bridge over the footpath access to Wardie Bay and passed over first one and then a second set of points as it rounded a gentle bend in the route. This is where disaster struck: as it approached a second, smaller, bridge (which carried it over the Wardie Burn, marked nowadays by a break in the seawall) the left-hand leading wheel of the engine jumped the rails and the locomotive derailed.

It continued to plough along the trackbed, derailed, for some 30 yards, ripping up tracks and sleepers and partially demolished the bridge. In doing so it was eventually tipped over the side when it hit the stone parapet. It fell a height of 9 feet down the embankment and then slithered 20 yards down the foreshore, coming to rest on its right hand side (not the left, as shown in the engraving, which may have either been reversed or show it during recovery).

There were six people on the footplate when the crash happened of whom four were killed instantly; driver David Mathieson, his 9 year old son William Mackenzie Mathieson (out for an exciting Sunday trip), his brother-in-law and neighbour John Mackenzie and Andrew Morgan, a railway signalman hitching a lift back to Scotland Street. The fireman, James Bowling, had a lucky but painful escape, jumping from the tender as it left the tracks. He broke an arm and dislocated a shoulder amongst other injuries, but lived to tell the tale. A railway porter who was also cadging a lift, George Dall, found himself swimming in the waters of Wardie Bay from where he was pulled, miraculously unhurt.

Blacksmith Thomas Gillies, his wife and two children had been sitting on the sea wall below the embankment, enjoying their day of rest, when the engine came crashing down from above, passing inches away from where they sat. All were badly scalded by escaping steam but survived. A horse cab was summoned to take the injured away to the Royal Infirmary. Sheriff Gordon, Procurator Fiscal Paterson and Chief Constable List were on the spot within the hour. They appointed engineers Mr Hawkins and Mr Jardine to investigate, while the officials of the railway company appointed their own civil engineer, Mr Lorimer, to also make enquiries. The Board of Trade appointed Captain (R.E.) Henry Whatley Tyler, to write a formal report.

None of the investigating engineers found any fault in the permanent way, engine No. 32 or with the manner in which it was driven by Mathieson. Tyler noted that although there were minor defects along the way none “ would have caused a steady engine thus to leave the line“. The type of engine – built locally in Leith by R. & W. Hawthorn – had been used without problem for 15 years and the only derailment it had suffered had been caused by a fractured rail. He did however note that the engine was particularly light at 11½ tons, that it had poor weight distribution and that there was a very short wheelbase of just 6 feet. This made it liable to oscillate at higher speeds and Tyler’s educated guess was that the engine had been travelling fast enough (“but not imprudently so“) to set up such an oscillating motion. Without the weight of a following train to restrain such gymnastics it was able to jump enough to leave the rails at a position where the gauge between the tracks was slightly too wide.

Margaret Stewart Mackenzie, the driver’s wife, lost not only her husband but also her brother and eldest son that day. She was left a widow with three children to support; a 7 year old girl and boys aged 3 and 1 years. She was also four months pregnant and would give birth to a daughter, Sarah Clapperton Mathieson, that December. The members of the Mathieson and Mackenzie family – who all lived next door to each other on Duncan (now Dundonald) Street – were also interred alongside eachother at the Old Calton Burying Ground.

Given the loss of her husband and brother the Mathieson widow and children found themselves without any financial support and a public subscription was set up under the coordination of the Lothian Road United Presbyterian Church for their benefit. In September the Scotsman reported that “a woman who assumes different names and represents herself to the the wife of an elder of Lothian Road U.P. Church” was wanted by the police for fraudulently soliciting for donations to the fund. The 1881 census shows that Margaret Mathieson stayed on at 10 Duncan Street and was living there with her 80 year old mother (Margaret Mackenzie), two sons (David, 24, a clerk and John ,21, a piano tuner) and her daughter (Sarah, 20, a dressmaker). She was working as a laundress. Sarah Clapperton Mathieson married 4 years later to Robert Fotheringham and they moved nearby to Airlie Place and then Deanpark Street, with at least 6 children born. Margaret would join them next door at Airlie Place, where she died in 1911 aged 81, after 51 years a widow.

Marion Mathieson was about 64 years old when her son David died and lost her son and a grandson that day. The Caledonian Mercury reported the agonising news that this was her fourth son to die; one was knocked down in the street near the family home, another fell from Salisbury Crags and a third had drowned off Aberdeen where he was serving an apprenticeship. She was by this time a widow, living in a cottage in the village of Corstorphine where she would die in 1871.

Of the other victim, Signalman Morgan, he was buried at Warriston Cemetery. A correspondent called Fair Play wrote to the Scotsman soon after to ask for subscriptions for the case of “Mrs Morgan, a highly respectable widow“, the mother of the deceased signalman. He had been “her only hope of subsistence since he was 12 years of age” and that the “good feeling of the public” had overlooked her plight.

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The thread about the building of the Scotland Street tunnel, a challenging – and occasionally fatal – engineering endeavour

This thread was originally written and published in September 2023.

In this thread from the other day I covered why Bellevue House in the centre of Drummond Place was demolished so as to allow the Scotland Street Tunnel to run directly beneath it. There’s a lot been written about the Tunnel: some of it’s even true! Despite a service life of just over 20 years and despite being defunct as a transport route for over 150 years, it still captivates the local imagination. The 1,052 yard long tunnel climbs from its entrance beneath Scotland Street to its terminus at the long gone “Canal Street Station” (beneath the Waverley Market) at a significant gradient of 1-in-27, directly beneath the axis of the New Town streets of Scotland Street, Dublin Street and St. Andrew Street so as not to undermine any buildings. But have you ever stopped to wonder how it was built?

The tunnel was planned by the Edinburgh, Leith & Newhaven Railway, which soon changed its name to the Edinburgh, Leith & Granton when the terminus on the Forth shifted to the latter harbour. Within a few years, this small railway was absorbed by the larger (but as-yet unbuilt) Edinburgh & Northern Railway in and changed its name one last time to the Edinburgh, Perth & Dundee in 1849 to better reflect the destinations it planned to connect.

When it came to construction, it wasn’t simply a case of starting at one end and digging towards the other, or even trying to meet in the middle from both. No, in fact they dug from both ends and also sunk 5 shafts along the route and dug out from all, at once. The process was to dig a narrow guide mine or drift , 6 x 6 feet wide and tall, linking all the shafts together and then widen that out into the 24 x 24 feet tunnel section and line it. The aerial view below shows the locations of these shafts, from the southern edge of St. Andrew Square (top right of image) to the southern edge of the Drummond Place garden (bottom left of image).

The shafts are not spaced equidistant along the route but are concentrated in the central section between Drummond Place and St. Andrew Square. This is because of the underlying geology; the hardest rocks to dig through are located here. From the northern portal and under Scotland Street to the north of Drummond Place was easy going through sand, clay and gravel but beyond this they struck multiple bands of sandstone, freestone, hard freestone, very hard freestone, whinstone, hard sandstone and blaes (mudstone and shale). Beyond St. Andrew square, going got easier again as the freestone is interspersed with multiple bands of clay. An excellent geological section map is available on Canmore, but the terms of its licensing don’t allow me to reproduce it here. So I went one better and re-drew it and re-coloured it to make it clearer for you.

The sources tell you the tunnel was constructed between 1844-47, but the newspapers confirm that the drift was actually started by the contractor James Mitchell (of Ross & Mitchell, who was father in law to James Gowans of Rockville) in February 1843 when the company was still known as the Edinburgh, Leith & Newhaven Railway. It was largely completed by February 1844, with the exception of the hardest section beneath Drummond Place and Abercromby Place. Much of the ground that was cut through here was water bearing and drainage was a problem before the whole drift was completed. A particular difficulty, which you can see in the above diagram, was the strata being cut through were thrusting upwards at an angle of around 20-30 degrees to the tunnel and so formed “walls” which held back the water. When the miners breached these, they could suddenly and unexpectedly release the water built up in the next layer. To counter this, the contractors bored out “jumper holes” (pilot holes) ahead of the excavations. When the jumper hole breached a geological wall and struck water, this could then be tapped off and drained away in a controlled manner before the whole drift advanced into the next strata.

This approach was quite successful, but disaster struck early on Friday 29th November 1844 when the nightshift workmen of No. 3 Shaft, digging away below the vicinity of Albany Place, bored out the jumper hole off the planned angle in error and breached a significant subterranean pocket of water which flooded the workings. This shouldn’t actually have been a surprise, the Thursday shift had noticed unusual springs of water in the workings and one of the miners had insisted to his mates that they were digging off of the intended route. Mr Mitchell, the contracting engineer, was informed, and made known his intention to go down with the morning shift at 6AM, to inspect the workings for himself. He asked the workmen to call him before they went down, however when the shift arrived they workmen called not on Mr Mitchell the engineer, but his brother Peter Mitchell, who was employed as a superintendent “but was not conversant in the business of mining“.

Instead of getting his brother, Peter Mitchell took it upon himself to do the inspection and went down with the gang. A short time later, a 14 year old boy – Jack – was being lowered into the shaft and was almost at the bottom when he heard “a loud roar of thunder” and yelled in a panic to be hauled back to the surface. Jack only just made it to the surface before a “huge wave came surging up the shaft” behind him and rose to a height of 80 feet, before “falling back again… almost as quickly as it had risen“. A second explosion of water occurred near the entrance to Broughton Markets out of No. 4 shaft, this one caused by the compression of the air in the tunnel by the flooding finding a route out and propelling the water before it. The basements in this area were flooded up to a depth of 4 feet. Once the initial torrents had subsided, the men at the surface found the drift and shafts were flooded and choked up with rocks, clay and debris from the onrush of water. The majority of the water however drained down and out of the tunnel mouth at Scotland Street “where it flooded the terminus of the completed portion of the railway to a considerable extent“: for a short period, the Canonmills Loch resurrected itself.

The men on the surface soon followed the receding water down the shaft to look for their mates. A ganger – Erskine – and a miner, Blair from Liberton – were soon found, “as might be expected, quite dead“. The body of another miner – Philips – would not be recovered until later. Tragically, he and Blair should not have even been there, their relief had overslept and were still putting their working clothes on on the surface when the disaster happened. Philips wife “resorted to the scene in the course of the forenoon and her wild shrieks and cries exhibited a spectacle to touch the coldest heart“. His body was found at around 3PM that day and that of Peter Mitchell, who should never have gone down the mine, was found at 4PM. Their bodies had been washed down the tunnel and were stopped beneath Drummond Place by a barrier of rock that had been left across the drift to help control the flow of water down the hill.

A public subscription was raised for the “families of all these poor men” who (with the exception of Mitchell the superintendent) would be “left destitute” by the loss of the breadwinner. The Edinburgh Evening Courant implored the directors of the railway to contribute generously.

The tunnel was finally completed and ready in mid-April 1847, when the company was known as the Edinburgh, Leith & Granton Railway. Captain Coddington, RE of the Railway Board inspected it and gave it the all clear on 10th April. It opened on Monday 17th May after “the most formidable difficulties“, on the same day as the Edinburgh & Glasgow Railway opened their extension from Haymarket to a (for now temporary) terminus underneath the new Waverley Bridge.

A watercolour painting by Joseph Ebsworth was completed a couple of months later, and from its vantage point of the Scott Monument we can clearly see a train emerging from the Scotland Street tunnel into Canal Street Station below Princes Street. There is a further thread here about that station, if you fancy reading some more on the Edinburgh, Leith & Granton Railway. The tunnel was too steep for the railway engines of the day when it was built, so trains were hauled up it on a rope by a static winding engine and ran downhill by gravity from Canal Street to Scotland Street, were a locomotive was attached for the onward journey to Granton or Leith.

Despite the effort of its construction, the tunnel ended up having a very short life and was closed to traffic only 21 years after it opened. You can read more about the various crimes and illicit goings on that the tunnel attracted during this time in this thread. In this time it also gained a reputation for accidents and the newspapers record many – it proved particularly dangerous for the men employed to work it:

• In December 1853, Thomas Cleghorn, a railway guard, was killed instantly in the tunnel when he struck his head on the wall after leaning out of the luggage van in which he was riding.
• In August 1855, a carriage left unattended at the top of the tunnel and without its brakes applied, ran down the incline and collided with a passenger train, causing multiple injuries, some severe. The shunter, Thomas Wells, pleaded guilty to “culpable neglect of duty” and was imprisoned for 9 months.
• In September 1857, a goods train emerging from the foot of the tunnel at Scotland Street did not stop and ran into the back of a slow-moving coal train. The driver of the latter train jumped from his engine but forgot to shut off the steam and apply the brakes in his panic. His engine ran off towards Granton at a speed of 30mph and crashed into a train of carriages which was fortunately almost empty, demolishing the lot. The few passengers on board had already jumped clear when the runaway train was seen to be approaching. The Glasgow Sentinel newspaper recorded that at Scotland Street station the damage was limited to 2 barrels of whisky, which broke and their “mountain dew scattered on the ground“
• In October 1859, John Adam, a railway labourer, was fatally injured after being struck by a train coming out of the tunnel. He had gone to fetch a lamp to work with and found himself caught between the train and the tunnel wall.
• In October 1859 also, the haulage cable snapped at 930AM in the morning, preventing use of the tunnel for the whole day.
• In June 1863, James Samuel, a carriage driver employed to move coaches around Canal Street Station by horse traction, caught his foot in the mechanism of a turntable and was run over by a train coming out of the tunnel on the haulage rope. His injuries proved fatal.
• In July 1865, a train of 13 carriages, 2 trucks and 3 brake wagons was moving downhill when it separated into two portions. The forward portion moved ahead, but was then hit by the rear portion when it began to slow as the brakemen, in the pitch dark, could not even see that the train had separated. There were no serious injuries.
• In September 1867, a train ran away down the hill from Canal Street Station and overshot the station at Scotland Street at the foot of the tunnel, the brakemen – one on every third carriage – had to resort to applying the emergency “drags”, stout pieces of timber that were shoved into the spokes of the wheels to bring them to an immediate (and violent) stop. There were no serious injuries.
• In November 1867, William Reid, a brakeman, was killed when he jumped from his train at the foot of the tunnel and fell, being run over by his own vehicle.

Ultimately, the tunnel was never a practical transport solution. Beyond its lack of engine traction, the platforms at Canal Street station were far too short to allow longer trains, and were at 90 degrees to the larger Edinburgh & Glasgow and North British Railway station, making connections clumsy and impractical. In 1863 the line’s then owners, the North British Railway, gained powers to construct a new line diverting around the tunnel via Abbeyhill. Construction began in 1865 and it opened (and the tunnel closed) on May 22nd, 1868. It has been abandoned as a transport corridor ever since, but has seen use variously as a car garage, industrial mushroom farm, air raid shelter and emergency railway control room for at least some the intervening years. Every so often a plan is mooted to re-open either as a tram or metro route, or as a cycleway.

Footnote. In February 2023, the Broughton Spurtle local newspaper broke the story that Dublin Street was subsiding – a “sinkhole” hole had appeared in the middle of the road. Coincidentally, this was right on top of No. 4 shaft, the one that flooded Broughton Markets in the 1844 disaster.

Note to readers: unfortunately in April 2026, a third-party plug-in more than exceeded its authority and broke many of the image links on this site. No images were lost but I will have to restore them page-by-page, which may take some time. In the meantime please bear with me while I go about rectifying this issue.

If you have found this site useful, informative or amusing then you can help contribute towards its running costs by supporting me on ko-fi. This includes my commitment to keeping it 100% advert and AI free for all time coming, and in helping to find further unusual stories to bring you by acquiring books and paying for research.
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#catima by @SylvieLorxu

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The thread about the baffling naming of Leith railway stations; know your North Leith from your Leith North; which South Leith is which and whether Leith Walk West or Leith Walk East is westmost!

This thread was originally written and published in September 2019.

We went to visit Trinity House expecting to find some treasures of Leith maritime history, but we were surprised to find some local railway history hidden round the back too, a bench from South Leith Railway Station which closed way, way back in 1903.

So let’s go on a little #NowAndThen visual trip down memory lane to South Leith station. The view is taken from Constitution Street looking east along the trackbed, what is now Tower Street. The tall remnant of buildings behind were part of the first Leith gas works, before they moved to Granton with the Edinburgh gas works. The station building is on the right, with the single platform behind it.

This was the first railway station in Leith, and was originally named as such when it opened in 1832 as an extension of the Edinburgh and Dalkeith Railway. This line ran from St. Leonards in Edinburgh to Midlothian, Leith being accessed by a reverse junction near Niddrie. This was the so-called “Innocent Railway“, in Scotch Gauge of 4ft 6in and horse drawn throughout. Looking the other way towards the Shore (and a prime example of that dreadful noughties architectural fad for oversized and inappropriate corner rotundas) we see Leith’s old Tower in the distance down Tower Street. Notice that the railway was not quite aligned with the modern Tower Street, but parallel. This continuation of the line beyond Constitution Street gave access to the east side of the port and its industries.

The station was on the sea front when it was built, with Leith Sands beyond and the high tide line beyond that. The railway providing a new boundary between land and shore as Leith crept northwards into the Forth. This station was handy for the Shore, where the steamers left from at the time, but was quickly swallowed up by seaward extensions of the docks and became increasingly inconveniently positioned. In 1845 the North British Railway bought over the Edinburgh & Dalkeith and set about converting their new possession into standard gauge and steam power. However, they were not interested in passenger traffic here – it was routes South from Edinburgh that had caused them to buy the E&DR – and closed South Leith to passengers in 1846. The line remained open for dock traffic, always it’s primary purpose as it had been built as a direct connection to the Midlothian Coalfield.

The naming of Leith’s railway stations was always a bit confusing. For a relatively small place, it had a lot of various stations and they were often duplicated due to the competing nature of the North British (NBR) and Caledonian Railways (CR), who fought petulantly with each other for access to the lucrative docks and industrial traffic. To add confusion, when most of these stations were first named, Leith was two distinct municipal parishes; South Leith and North Leith. These are ancient names, referring to the banks of the river of Water of Leith on which they lie, geographically they are more east and westerly of one and other than south and northerly. At various times there were stations called Leith, Leith Central, South Leith, North Leith, Leith North, Leith Citadel, Leith East, Leith Walk, Leith Walk West and Leith Walk East! (And that’s not counting those stations in the Leith boundaries which don’t have “Leith” in their name.)

The next station to open in Leith was North Leith in 1846. It was opened as a branch of the Edinburgh, Leith & Granton Railway, which ran from Canal Street Station (at right angles to the present day Waverley), through the Scotland Street Tunnel to Trinity and on to a rail ferry at Granton Docks. The NBR bought this railway too in 1862 and experimented with calling the station variously Leith Citadel or Leith North, before settling back on North Leith. They re-opened the old Edinburgh & Dalkeith Leith station in 1859 as a single platform called South Leith.

The next arrival was that of the Caledonian Railway, who opened a station called Leith in 1869 on a rather circuitous line around the North and West of the city from Princes Street Station via Roseburn and Newhaven. It would be renamed North Leith in 1903. To get around the confusion of two rival North Leith stations being a few hundred metres from each other on the same street, most maps stuck with Leith for the Caley station and North Leith for the NBR. To locals it would just have been the Caley and North British stations.

The North Leith muddles would be solved in 1947 when the ex-NBR station, by now 24 years in the LNER grouping, was closed to passenger traffic. Rather pointlessly, 5 years later the ex-Caley North Leith was renamed Leith North, and the ex-NBR North Leith goods station once again became Leith Citadel!

The renaming of the Caley station was not the only change on the Leith railway map in 1903; this was the year the North British opened their (far too) vast station at Leith Central – which of course was well to the south of South Leith… It’s arrival resulted in the closure of the latter station for the second and final time. Leith Central was on a fairly short branch from Waverley via Abbeyhill, but could never match the electric tramway on speed, frequency, convenience and on proximity to destinations, so it always struggled for patronage. Leith Central was the last major railway terminus built in Scotland, and had a short life, closing in 1952 after a fairly unintense life. It had been built more as a symbol of the NBR‘s dominance and a blocker to the Caley opening a passenger station in the centre of Leith than anything else.

Those grand Caley plans were the Leith New Lines, a very expensive and winding route around Leith to connect the eastern and western sides of the Docks. Large goods stations were opened at Bonnington, Leith Walk, Restalrig and South Leith; where it caused confusion with the NBR South Leith goods station. The Caley had wanted to provide passenger stations too; the platforms and some other structures for these were actually built, at Victoria Park in Trinity and above street level on Leith Walk on the Gordon Street railway arches. After Leith Walk, the intention was a costly branch to Princes Street station from a junction near Lochend via tunnels under Calton Hill and cut-and-cover tunnelling of Princes Street itself. None of these plans came to fruition though, the NBR‘s massive Leith Central meant it would have been a costly folly (which Leith Central admittedly also was).

The two parallel, neighbouring South Leith Goods stations of the NBR and Caley happily co-existed side-by-side into the 1950s, when British Railway in their wisdom renamed the ex-NBR station Leith South and ex-CR station Leith East. The latter closed in the 1970s, the former lasted into the 1990s, its yard (South Leith Yard) is still technically in use, but has not seen any traffic in the best part of 10 years.

The last set of Leith-named stations were those of Leith Walk – none of which are actually in Leith by any definition later than the 18th century! Leith Walk passenger station was opened by the NBR in 1869 when they built a diversionary line from Waverley station to Trinity via Abbeyhill to avoid the awkward Scotland Street tunnel. Passenger stations were added along the line, including where it passed under Leith Walk at Shrubhill. An enormous goods yard was provided on the east side of the Walk. When the Caley opened their Leith New Lines in 1903, they also provided a goods yard for Leith Walk, further to the north. Both were called Leith Walk (goods) so inevitably were referred to as the North British or Caley to differentiate them.

The passenger station closed in 1930, another victim of competition from the electric tramway. After nationalisation, the ever wise British Railways decided to rationalise matters and renamed the ex-NBR station Leith Walk East and the ex-Caley station Leith Walk West. This makes perfect sense in principle to a naming committee in a far off office, except it results in Leith Walk East being more westerly than Leith Walk West on account of Leith Walk not running on a true north-south axis! Nothing is ever straightforward when it comes to the names of Leith’s railway stations!

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The thread about the baffling naming of Leith railway stations; know your North Leith from your Leith North; which South Leith is which and whether Leith Walk West or Leith Walk East is westmost!

This thread was originally written and published in September 2019.

We went to visit Trinity House expecting to find some treasures of Leith maritime history, but we were surprised to find some local railway history hidden round the back too, a bench from South Leith Railway Station which closed way, way back in 1903.

So let’s go on a little #NowAndThen visual trip down memory lane to South Leith station. The view is taken from Constitution Street looking east along the trackbed, what is now Tower Street. The tall remnant of buildings behind were part of the first Leith gas works, before they moved to Granton with the Edinburgh gas works. The station building is on the right, with the single platform behind it.

This was the first railway station in Leith, and was originally named as such when it opened in 1832 as an extension of the Edinburgh and Dalkeith Railway. This line ran from St. Leonards in Edinburgh to Midlothian, Leith being accessed by a reverse junction near Niddrie. This was the so-called “Innocent Railway“, in Scotch Gauge of 4ft 6in and horse drawn throughout. Looking the other way towards the Shore (and a prime example of that dreadful noughties architectural fad for oversized and inappropriate corner rotundas) we see Leith’s old Tower in the distance down Tower Street. Notice that the railway was not quite aligned with the modern Tower Street, but parallel. This continuation of the line beyond Constitution Street gave access to the east side of the port and its industries.

The station was on the sea front when it was built, with Leith Sands beyond and the high tide line beyond that. The railway providing a new boundary between land and shore as Leith crept northwards into the Forth. This station was handy for the Shore, where the steamers left from at the time, but was quickly swallowed up by seaward extensions of the docks and became increasingly inconveniently positioned. In 1845 the North British Railway bought over the Edinburgh & Dalkeith and set about converting their new possession into standard gauge and steam power. However, they were not interested in passenger traffic here – it was routes South from Edinburgh that had caused them to buy the E&DR – and closed South Leith to passengers in 1846. The line remained open for dock traffic, always it’s primary purpose as it had been built as a direct connection to the Midlothian Coalfield.

The naming of Leith’s railway stations was always a bit confusing. For a relatively small place, it had a lot of various stations and they were often duplicated due to the competing nature of the North British (NBR) and Caledonian Railways (CR), who fought petulantly with each other for access to the lucrative docks and industrial traffic. To add confusion, when most of these stations were first named, Leith was two distinct municipal parishes; South Leith and North Leith. These are ancient names, referring to the banks of the river of Water of Leith on which they lie, geographically they are more east and westerly of one and other than south and northerly. At various times there were stations called Leith, Leith Central, South Leith, North Leith, Leith North, Leith Citadel, Leith East, Leith Walk, Leith Walk West and Leith Walk East! (And that’s not counting those stations in the Leith boundaries which don’t have “Leith” in their name.)

The next station to open in Leith was North Leith in 1846. It was opened as a branch of the Edinburgh, Leith & Granton Railway, which ran from Canal Street Station (at right angles to the present day Waverley), through the Scotland Street Tunnel to Trinity and on to a rail ferry at Granton Docks. The NBR bought this railway too in 1862 and experimented with calling the station variously Leith Citadel or Leith North, before settling back on North Leith. They re-opened the old Edinburgh & Dalkeith Leith station in 1859 as a single platform called South Leith.

The next arrival was that of the Caledonian Railway, who opened a station called Leith in 1869 on a rather circuitous line around the North and West of the city from Princes Street Station via Roseburn and Newhaven. It would be renamed North Leith in 1903. To get around the confusion of two rival North Leith stations being a few hundred metres from each other on the same street, most maps stuck with Leith for the Caley station and North Leith for the NBR. To locals it would just have been the Caley and North British stations.

The North Leith muddles would be solved in 1947 when the ex-NBR station, by now 24 years in the LNER grouping, was closed to passenger traffic. Rather pointlessly, 5 years later the ex-Caley North Leith was renamed Leith North, and the ex-NBR North Leith goods station once again became Leith Citadel!

The renaming of the Caley station was not the only change on the Leith railway map in 1903; this was the year the North British opened their (far too) vast station at Leith Central – which of course was well to the south of South Leith… It’s arrival resulted in the closure of the latter station for the second and final time. Leith Central was on a fairly short branch from Waverley via Abbeyhill, but could never match the electric tramway on speed, frequency, convenience and on proximity to destinations, so it always struggled for patronage. Leith Central was the last major railway terminus built in Scotland, and had a short life, closing in 1952 after a fairly unintense life. It had been built more as a symbol of the NBR‘s dominance and a blocker to the Caley opening a passenger station in the centre of Leith than anything else.

Those grand Caley plans were the Leith New Lines, a very expensive and winding route around Leith to connect the eastern and western sides of the Docks. Large goods stations were opened at Bonnington, Leith Walk, Restalrig and South Leith; where it caused confusion with the NBR South Leith goods station. The Caley had wanted to provide passenger stations too; the platforms and some other structures for these were actually built, at Victoria Park in Trinity and above street level on Leith Walk on the Gordon Street railway arches. After Leith Walk, the intention was a costly branch to Princes Street station from a junction near Lochend via tunnels under Calton Hill and cut-and-cover tunnelling of Princes Street itself. None of these plans came to fruition though, the NBR‘s massive Leith Central meant it would have been a costly folly (which Leith Central admittedly also was).

The two parallel, neighbouring South Leith Goods stations of the NBR and Caley happily co-existed side-by-side into the 1950s, when British Railway in their wisdom renamed the ex-NBR station Leith South and ex-CR station Leith East. The latter closed in the 1970s, the former lasted into the 1990s, its yard (South Leith Yard) is still technically in use, but has not seen any traffic in the best part of 10 years.

The last set of Leith-named stations were those of Leith Walk – none of which are actually in Leith by any definition later than the 18th century! Leith Walk passenger station was opened by the NBR in 1869 when they built a diversionary line from Waverley station to Trinity via Abbeyhill to avoid the awkward Scotland Street tunnel. Passenger stations were added along the line, including where it passed under Leith Walk at Shrubhill. An enormous goods yard was provided on the east side of the Walk. When the Caley opened their Leith New Lines in 1903, they also provided a goods yard for Leith Walk, further to the north. Both were called Leith Walk (goods) so inevitably were referred to as the North British or Caley to differentiate them.

The passenger station closed in 1930, another victim of competition from the electric tramway. After nationalisation, the ever wise British Railways decided to rationalise matters and renamed the ex-NBR station Leith Walk East and the ex-Caley station Leith Walk West. This makes perfect sense in principle to a naming committee in a far off office, except it results in Leith Walk East being more westerly than Leith Walk West on account of Leith Walk not running on a true north-south axis! Nothing is ever straightforward when it comes to the names of Leith’s railway stations!

If you have found this useful, informative or amusing, perhaps you would like to help contribute towards the running costs of this site (including keeping it ad-free and my book-buying budget) by supporting me on ko-fi. Or please do just share this post on social media or amongst friends.

These threads © 2017-2025, Andy Arthur

#NowAndThen #CaledonianRailway #Caley #EdinburghDalkeithRailway #NorthBritishRailway #RailwayStations #Railways #transport #Transportation #Written2019

The thread about the baffling naming of Leith railway stations; know your North Leith from your Leith North; which South Leith is which and whether Leith Walk West or Leith Walk East is westmost!

This thread was originally written and published in September 2019.

We went to visit Trinity House expecting to find some treasures of Leith maritime history, but we were surprised to find some local railway history hidden round the back too, a bench from South Leith Railway Station which closed way, way back in 1903.

So let’s go on a little #NowAndThen visual trip down memory lane to South Leith station. The view is taken from Constitution Street looking east along the trackbed, what is now Tower Street. The tall remnant of buildings behind were part of the first Leith gas works, before they moved to Granton with the Edinburgh gas works. The station building is on the right, with the single platform behind it.

This was the first railway station in Leith, and was originally named as such when it opened in 1832 as an extension of the Edinburgh and Dalkeith Railway. This line ran from St. Leonards in Edinburgh to Midlothian, Leith being accessed by a reverse junction near Niddrie. This was the so-called “Innocent Railway“, in Scotch Gauge of 4ft 6in and horse drawn throughout. Looking the other way towards the Shore (and a prime example of that dreadful noughties architectural fad for oversized and inappropriate corner rotundas) we see Leith’s old Tower in the distance down Tower Street. Notice that the railway was not quite aligned with the modern Tower Street, but parallel. This continuation of the line beyond Constitution Street gave access to the east side of the port and its industries.

The station was on the sea front when it was built, with Leith Sands beyond and the high tide line beyond that. The railway providing a new boundary between land and shore as Leith crept northwards into the Forth. This station was handy for the Shore, where the steamers left from at the time, but was quickly swallowed up by seaward extensions of the docks and became increasingly inconveniently positioned. In 1845 the North British Railway bought over the Edinburgh & Dalkeith and set about converting their new possession into standard gauge and steam power. However, they were not interested in passenger traffic here – it was routes South from Edinburgh that had caused them to buy the E&DR – and closed South Leith to passengers in 1846. The line remained open for dock traffic, always it’s primary purpose as it had been built as a direct connection to the Midlothian Coalfield.

The naming of Leith’s railway stations was always a bit confusing. For a relatively small place, it had a lot of various stations and they were often duplicated due to the competing nature of the North British (NBR) and Caledonian Railways (CR), who fought petulantly with each other for access to the lucrative docks and industrial traffic. To add confusion, when most of these stations were first named, Leith was two distinct municipal parishes; South Leith and North Leith. These are ancient names, referring to the banks of the river of Water of Leith on which they lie, geographically they are more east and westerly of one and other than south and northerly. At various times there were stations called Leith, Leith Central, South Leith, North Leith, Leith North, Leith Citadel, Leith East, Leith Walk, Leith Walk West and Leith Walk East! (And that’s not counting those stations in the Leith boundaries which don’t have “Leith” in their name.)

The next station to open in Leith was North Leith in 1846. It was opened as a branch of the Edinburgh, Leith & Granton Railway, which ran from Canal Street Station (at right angles to the present day Waverley), through the Scotland Street Tunnel to Trinity and on to a rail ferry at Granton Docks. The NBR bought this railway too in 1862 and experimented with calling the station variously Leith Citadel or Leith North, before settling back on North Leith. They re-opened the old Edinburgh & Dalkeith Leith station in 1859 as a single platform called South Leith.

The next arrival was that of the Caledonian Railway, who opened a station called Leith in 1869 on a rather circuitous line around the North and West of the city from Princes Street Station via Roseburn and Newhaven. It would be renamed North Leith in 1903. To get around the confusion of two rival North Leith stations being a few hundred metres from each other on the same street, most maps stuck with Leith for the Caley station and North Leith for the NBR. To locals it would just have been the Caley and North British stations.

The North Leith muddles would be solved in 1947 when the ex-NBR station, by now 24 years in the LNER grouping, was closed to passenger traffic. Rather pointlessly, 5 years later the ex-Caley North Leith was renamed Leith North, and the ex-NBR North Leith goods station once again became Leith Citadel!

The renaming of the Caley station was not the only change on the Leith railway map in 1903; this was the year the North British opened their (far too) vast station at Leith Central – which of course was well to the south of South Leith… It’s arrival resulted in the closure of the latter station for the second and final time. Leith Central was on a fairly short branch from Waverley via Abbeyhill, but could never match the electric tramway on speed, frequency, convenience and on proximity to destinations, so it always struggled for patronage. Leith Central was the last major railway terminus built in Scotland, and had a short life, closing in 1952 after a fairly unintense life. It had been built more as a symbol of the NBR‘s dominance and a blocker to the Caley opening a passenger station in the centre of Leith than anything else.

Those grand Caley plans were the Leith New Lines, a very expensive and winding route around Leith to connect the eastern and western sides of the Docks. Large goods stations were opened at Bonnington, Leith Walk, Restalrig and South Leith; where it caused confusion with the NBR South Leith goods station. The Caley had wanted to provide passenger stations too; the platforms and some other structures for these were actually built, at Victoria Park in Trinity and above street level on Leith Walk on the Gordon Street railway arches. After Leith Walk, the intention was a costly branch to Princes Street station from a junction near Lochend via tunnels under Calton Hill and cut-and-cover tunnelling of Princes Street itself. None of these plans came to fruition though, the NBR‘s massive Leith Central meant it would have been a costly folly (which Leith Central admittedly also was).

The two parallel, neighbouring South Leith Goods stations of the NBR and Caley happily co-existed side-by-side into the 1950s, when British Railway in their wisdom renamed the ex-NBR station Leith South and ex-CR station Leith East. The latter closed in the 1970s, the former lasted into the 1990s, its yard (South Leith Yard) is still technically in use, but has not seen any traffic in the best part of 10 years.

The last set of Leith-named stations were those of Leith Walk – none of which are actually in Leith by any definition later than the 18th century! Leith Walk passenger station was opened by the NBR in 1869 when they built a diversionary line from Waverley station to Trinity via Abbeyhill to avoid the awkward Scotland Street tunnel. Passenger stations were added along the line, including where it passed under Leith Walk at Shrubhill. An enormous goods yard was provided on the east side of the Walk. When the Caley opened their Leith New Lines in 1903, they also provided a goods yard for Leith Walk, further to the north. Both were called Leith Walk (goods) so inevitably were referred to as the North British or Caley to differentiate them.

The passenger station closed in 1930, another victim of competition from the electric tramway. After nationalisation, the ever wise British Railways decided to rationalise matters and renamed the ex-NBR station Leith Walk East and the ex-Caley station Leith Walk West. This makes perfect sense in principle to a naming committee in a far off office, except it results in Leith Walk East being more westerly than Leith Walk West on account of Leith Walk not running on a true north-south axis! Nothing is ever straightforward when it comes to the names of Leith’s railway stations!

If you have found this useful, informative or amusing, perhaps you would like to help contribute towards the running costs of this site (including keeping it ad-free and my book-buying budget) by supporting me on ko-fi. Or please do just share this post on social media or amongst friends.

These threads © 2017-2025, Andy Arthur

#NowAndThen #CaledonianRailway #Caley #EdinburghDalkeithRailway #NorthBritishRailway #RailwayStations #Railways #transport #Transportation #Written2019

The thread about the baffling naming of Leith railway stations; know your North Leith from your Leith North; which South Leith is which and whether Leith Walk West or Leith Walk East is westmost!

This thread was originally written and published in September 2019.

We went to visit Trinity House expecting to find some treasures of Leith maritime history, but we were surprised to find some local railway history hidden round the back too, a bench from South Leith Railway Station which closed way, way back in 1903.

So let’s go on a little #NowAndThen visual trip down memory lane to South Leith station. The view is taken from Constitution Street looking east along the trackbed, what is now Tower Street. The tall remnant of buildings behind were part of the first Leith gas works, before they moved to Granton with the Edinburgh gas works. The station building is on the right, with the single platform behind it.

This was the first railway station in Leith, and was originally named as such when it opened in 1832 as an extension of the Edinburgh and Dalkeith Railway. This line ran from St. Leonards in Edinburgh to Midlothian, Leith being accessed by a reverse junction near Niddrie. This was the so-called “Innocent Railway“, in Scotch Gauge of 4ft 6in and horse drawn throughout. Looking the other way towards the Shore (and a prime example of that dreadful noughties architectural fad for oversized and inappropriate corner rotundas) we see Leith’s old Tower in the distance down Tower Street. Notice that the railway was not quite aligned with the modern Tower Street, but parallel. This continuation of the line beyond Constitution Street gave access to the east side of the port and its industries.

The station was on the sea front when it was built, with Leith Sands beyond and the high tide line beyond that. The railway providing a new boundary between land and shore as Leith crept northwards into the Forth. This station was handy for the Shore, where the steamers left from at the time, but was quickly swallowed up by seaward extensions of the docks and became increasingly inconveniently positioned. In 1845 the North British Railway bought over the Edinburgh & Dalkeith and set about converting their new possession into standard gauge and steam power. However, they were not interested in passenger traffic here – it was routes South from Edinburgh that had caused them to buy the E&DR – and closed South Leith to passengers in 1846. The line remained open for dock traffic, always it’s primary purpose as it had been built as a direct connection to the Midlothian Coalfield.

The naming of Leith’s railway stations was always a bit confusing. For a relatively small place, it had a lot of various stations and they were often duplicated due to the competing nature of the North British (NBR) and Caledonian Railways (CR), who fought petulantly with each other for access to the lucrative docks and industrial traffic. To add confusion, when most of these stations were first named, Leith was two distinct municipal parishes; South Leith and North Leith. These are ancient names, referring to the banks of the river of Water of Leith on which they lie, geographically they are more east and westerly of one and other than south and northerly. At various times there were stations called Leith, Leith Central, South Leith, North Leith, Leith North, Leith Citadel, Leith East, Leith Walk, Leith Walk West and Leith Walk East! (And that’s not counting those stations in the Leith boundaries which don’t have “Leith” in their name.)

The next station to open in Leith was North Leith in 1846. It was opened as a branch of the Edinburgh, Leith & Granton Railway, which ran from Canal Street Station (at right angles to the present day Waverley), through the Scotland Street Tunnel to Trinity and on to a rail ferry at Granton Docks. The NBR bought this railway too in 1862 and experimented with calling the station variously Leith Citadel or Leith North, before settling back on North Leith. They re-opened the old Edinburgh & Dalkeith Leith station in 1859 as a single platform called South Leith.

The next arrival was that of the Caledonian Railway, who opened a station called Leith in 1869 on a rather circuitous line around the North and West of the city from Princes Street Station via Roseburn and Newhaven. It would be renamed North Leith in 1903. To get around the confusion of two rival North Leith stations being a few hundred metres from each other on the same street, most maps stuck with Leith for the Caley station and North Leith for the NBR. To locals it would just have been the Caley and North British stations.

The North Leith muddles would be solved in 1947 when the ex-NBR station, by now 24 years in the LNER grouping, was closed to passenger traffic. Rather pointlessly, 5 years later the ex-Caley North Leith was renamed Leith North, and the ex-NBR North Leith goods station once again became Leith Citadel!

The renaming of the Caley station was not the only change on the Leith railway map in 1903; this was the year the North British opened their (far too) vast station at Leith Central – which of course was well to the south of South Leith… It’s arrival resulted in the closure of the latter station for the second and final time. Leith Central was on a fairly short branch from Waverley via Abbeyhill, but could never match the electric tramway on speed, frequency, convenience and on proximity to destinations, so it always struggled for patronage. Leith Central was the last major railway terminus built in Scotland, and had a short life, closing in 1952 after a fairly unintense life. It had been built more as a symbol of the NBR‘s dominance and a blocker to the Caley opening a passenger station in the centre of Leith than anything else.

Those grand Caley plans were the Leith New Lines, a very expensive and winding route around Leith to connect the eastern and western sides of the Docks. Large goods stations were opened at Bonnington, Leith Walk, Restalrig and South Leith; where it caused confusion with the NBR South Leith goods station. The Caley had wanted to provide passenger stations too; the platforms and some other structures for these were actually built, at Victoria Park in Trinity and above street level on Leith Walk on the Gordon Street railway arches. After Leith Walk, the intention was a costly branch to Princes Street station from a junction near Lochend via tunnels under Calton Hill and cut-and-cover tunnelling of Princes Street itself. None of these plans came to fruition though, the NBR‘s massive Leith Central meant it would have been a costly folly (which Leith Central admittedly also was).

The two parallel, neighbouring South Leith Goods stations of the NBR and Caley happily co-existed side-by-side into the 1950s, when British Railway in their wisdom renamed the ex-NBR station Leith South and ex-CR station Leith East. The latter closed in the 1970s, the former lasted into the 1990s, its yard (South Leith Yard) is still technically in use, but has not seen any traffic in the best part of 10 years.

The last set of Leith-named stations were those of Leith Walk – none of which are actually in Leith by any definition later than the 18th century! Leith Walk passenger station was opened by the NBR in 1869 when they built a diversionary line from Waverley station to Trinity via Abbeyhill to avoid the awkward Scotland Street tunnel. Passenger stations were added along the line, including where it passed under Leith Walk at Shrubhill. An enormous goods yard was provided on the east side of the Walk. When the Caley opened their Leith New Lines in 1903, they also provided a goods yard for Leith Walk, further to the north. Both were called Leith Walk (goods) so inevitably were referred to as the North British or Caley to differentiate them.

The passenger station closed in 1930, another victim of competition from the electric tramway. After nationalisation, the ever wise British Railways decided to rationalise matters and renamed the ex-NBR station Leith Walk East and the ex-Caley station Leith Walk West. This makes perfect sense in principle to a naming committee in a far off office, except it results in Leith Walk East being more westerly than Leith Walk West on account of Leith Walk not running on a true north-south axis! Nothing is ever straightforward when it comes to the names of Leith’s railway stations!

If you have found this useful, informative or amusing, perhaps you would like to help contribute towards the running costs of this site (including keeping it ad-free and my book-buying budget) by supporting me on ko-fi. Or please do just share this post on social media or amongst friends.

These threads © 2017-2025, Andy Arthur

#NowAndThen #CaledonianRailway #Caley #EdinburghDalkeithRailway #NorthBritishRailway #RailwayStations #Railways #transport #Transportation #Written2019

Victoria Station: the thread abut a forgotten Royal rail halt you’ve probably never heard of

This thread was originally written and published in June 2020.

This is the sort of unexpected riddle that I like. You’re out for a walk and you see an old gateway that is rather too well made for the wall it sits in and doesn’t seem to lead anywhere.

Beyond the unimpressive wooden gate itself, there’s just a little wedge of grass and overgrowth beyond it, before it descends straight down towards the East Coast Mainline railway.

So why is this old gate here? Well, if you rake around in the books and maps you’ll find out that this isn’t just any old railway access gate, this is an old Royal railway access gate. You see, these gate piers are all that remains of Queen Victoria’s personal, private railway station for when she was visiting Edinburgh and lodging in the Palace of Holyroodhouse. We can just see the station in the below photo taken looking east from “Muschet’s Cairn” in Holyrood Park in the 1880s; to the right of the tenement there is a projection, with a distant chimney above it. This is a covered walkway and an iron archway over the gate.

Through the gateway, it was just a short royal stroll down a flight of steps to a private platform for the royal train. Here it could be met by one’s personal carriage so that one could be whisked the short distance away to the back gate of the Palace of Holyroodhouse, far from the prying eyes of the Edinburgh crowd.

In 1850 The Scotsman reported that the Directors of the North British Railway were “in the course of erection” of a platform at Meadowbank for the Royal Train to stop at following its inaugural run over the Tweed on the Royal Border Bridge.

The newspaper described the new station was” to be tastefully ornamented for the occasion, there is to be a stair leading up to the old public road at Meadowbank, and distant only a few yards from the gate into Holyrood Park. Her Majesty’s private carriage will here be in waiting to receive her; so that, in the course of ten minutes are the arrival of the train, the Queen and the Royal Consort will, in all likelihood, be occupying the apartments that have been fitted up for their reception in Holyrood Palace.“ Fortunately for us, the London Illustrated News sent ahead an artist who was there to capture the scene and gives us the only known image of the station. Notice the crown atop the royal carriage.

For the Queen’s visit to Edinburgh in September 1852, the Scotsman went so far as to refer to the “Victoria Station at Meadowbank“. Ten horses and two royal private carriages were sent ahead from London to Edinburgh via York, arriving by the afternoon mail train for her Majesty’s personal use in travelling between Meadowbank and Holyrood. When the Queen arrived on September 1st, “The engine was beautifully decorated, having in front the words “God Save the Queen” in large gilt letters.” After the formalities were concluded with the greeting party, the Queen and Prince Albert ascended the stairs from the platform to their waiting carriages, where a guard of honour of the 7th Hussars from Piershill Barracks was waiting, their band striking up God Save the Queen.

Once the royal party were officially in residence at the Palace of Holyroodhouse, the Royal Standard was run up the flagpole and the gunners of Edinburgh castle fired a salute. This was however their second of the day; a signal hoisted earlier in the morning from the Nelson Memorial on the top of Calton Hill to a London steamer approaching Leith had been misinterpreted and an over-enthusiastic garrison had fired the royal salute. This created a minor panic amongst the dignitaries, railway officials and spectators of the city who suddenly feared that the Queen had arrived and nobody was there to greet her. One can only imagine the pandemonium until the railway telegraph office located the royal train outside Dunbar.

For the 1860 visit, a description is given of how the station was decorated for such visits. “The stair leading from the platform to the road was covered with an awning of white and pink calico, and the recesses on either side contained a neatly arranged assortment of flowers, evergreens and heather. The stair-case was covered with a merled carpet, with a stripe of Stuart tartan in the centre“.

As far as is known, there was only one occasion when a regular passenger train stopped here; on August 22nd 1872 a London to Edinburgh express was temporarily halted to allow some of Queen Victoria’s children to disembark. The last use of the station was for the Royal visit to Scotland in 1881. Even the Victorians realised stopping trains on the mainline into Edinburgh from London just a mile shy of the final destination for Royal purposes wasn’t the best use of the railway. The practice of also loading wagons onto the back of the royal train carrying state coaches and horses incurred further delays, as these had to be brought down the line from North Bridge Station (what would later become Waverley).

In 1882, an irate letter was written to the green ink page of the Scotsman to complain that the Town Council were now using the platform as a collection point for the “ashes and dirt” of one quarter of the city before its onwards transport by rail for disposal. The station was only “open” for 31 years – and even then it was used only once or twice a year – but those gate piers have survived 141 years longer than that. There’s a planning application out though to build on this gushet*, so catch them while you still can. (* = gushet is a Scots term for a triangular portion of land). The same stretch of wall has another (unresolved) little secret too. The ghost of a small building that I can’t quite unravel. It looks like two wall ends (green) with the back of a fireplace or window (yellow) in between.

If there was something here, it’s missing from the 1817 and 1849 town plans, so either is older than both or came and went in between. The boundary wall pre-dates the railway and this road was widened on a number of occasions starting with the Royal Visit of George IV in 1822. No structure is marked but this could have been a gardener’s bothy removed when the road was widened.

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Destructor! the thread about Powderhall’s railway and how it dealt with the Victorian city’s rubbish

Now here’s a little story, To tell it is a must
About an unsung hero, That moves away your dust

Lonnie Donegan, “My Old Man’s a Dustman”

Powderhall was one of Edinburgh’s lesser known railway stations. It was only open for 21 years, from 1895 until closure in 1916 as a wartime economy measure (to free up manpower for military recruitment). It was one of a number of less well patronised stations in the city that were closed; some would later reopen after the war, but Powderhall never did.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/127340508@N05/40846647883

The bearded stationmaster standing on the platform above may well be the same man sitting on the bench below.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/127340508@N05/46706543154

The station opened was opened by the North British Railway on April 22nd 1895 on its existing line from Abbeyhill Junction to Granton and North Leith.

Coming from the direction of Edinburgh, it was immediately preceded by Leith Walk Station and followed by Trinity (on the Granton line) and Bonnington (on the North Leith line). The Evening News described it as the “best that the Company have erected” in the district, with excellently appointed waiting rooms, mirrors and lighting throughout. There were two waiting rooms and waiting would be required as there was only one train per hour, and these only served the Granton line as it was felt Leith Walk and Bonnington were too close to make stopping the trains to Leith there worthwhile. The station master was Mr Bowerbank, “for 19 years inspector at Waverley Station“. The station was accessed from a booking hall that was at the level of Broughton Road, extended out from the bridge that took the carriageway across the tracks.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/127340508@N05/34004075508

The animated transition below shows the above image overlaid on a modern streetscape.

The photo of the station booking office was probably taken not that long after closure, judging by some of the detail we can see. The place looks a bit abandoned, with a light over the doorway removed or broken? Posters in windows may indicate its closure and the station pinboard appears to be obscured by large posters on which is legible “The Sale of …”.

A fire here in July 1925 destroyed the roof and interior and it was demolished not long thereafter. The façade was reduced in height at this time to continue to serve as the bridge parapet, so when you pass it you can be forgiven for thinking it was always meant to look that way. Instead, the three central recesses are the former window bays and the lower section on either side the doorways, rebuilt to serve as gateways to the station steps which continue to provide access to the platforms long after closure.

In 1930, then owners the London & North Eastern Railway applied for permission to convert the two waiting rooms into domestic houses, which was approved. Each house got a section of garden and had fenced-off access down the former platform via the station steps from Broughton Road. The below photo, which could be any time in the 1950s through to 1950s, shows smoke coming from one of the chimneys, a sure sign of life within.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/127340508@N05/47813042281

https://www.flickr.com/photos/127340508@N05/46377992525

The area name Powderhall comes from a house of that name the Powder Hall, a house and (gun)powder mill set up in the locality around 1695 by the local landowners the Balfours of Pilrig. From the picture below with its wonky window placements and awkward proportions, one gets the idea that it was an older 17th century house that had been progressively altered to try and fit the ideal of a Georgian villa, with mixed success. The house passed later into the Mylne family, the Setons and then Sir John Hunter Blair, grandson of Sir James Hunter Blair.

In the map below, the site of the Railway Station is in Mr. Milne’s ground, just to the left of the house of Rose Bank.

In the back of quite a number of the above pictures we can see parts of a Scottish Baronial-style building. This was the ominously named Corporation Destructor! In a time when nearly all household waste was combustible it was mostly burned in the home fireplace; glass and ceramic jars and bottles were returned and reused, and metal cans had recycling value too. Larger or non-combustible items and what to do with partially combusted ash, rotten food and the thousands of tons of horse manure posed a growing problem however. In 1891 the city estimated it had an annual collection of 110,000 tons of refuse. 20,000 tons were classed as “mud or sludge” and were easily disposed of. 61,000 tons were being sent by rail or canal to farms. 7,000 tons were going to parks and gardens in the city and the balance of 22,000 tons was being dumped as landfill in old quarries and ravines. There was an additional problem that the “quality” of the waste was decreasing, household waste was increasingly tarnished with undesirable components and thanks to improved domestic sanitation had far less in the way of “night soil” in it and therefore its market value had collapsed. The city’s receipts for selling its waste in the the decade 1881-90 had decreased by over half from 1871-80. The solution was the destructor, a high-temperature incinerator to treat the waste by combustion.

This scheme was highly controversial before it was even built. One local proprietor, writing to the Scotsman labelled it the “Gehenna of Edinburgh” (a valley in the Holy Land where the kings of Juda sacrificed their children in a fire; a destination of the wicked where they atoned for their sins.) The Dean of Guilt Court approved its construction on March 30th 1892 and it was estimated it would cost £16,000.

The Destructor system was designed by the City Engineer, John Aitken Cooper in consultation with Glasgwegian marine engineer James Howden. In 1882 Howden had patented a forced-draught system for boilers which blew air pre-heated by the boiler’s own hot exhaust gases into the furnace, increasing the rate and consistency of combustion. This was perfect for ensuring thorough “treatment” of the waste being consumed in the furnaces and the higher temperatures resulted in a reduction in empyreumatic gases; the products of imperfect combustion, which resulted in smells, smoke and pollution. There were ten combustion “cells“, each of which had a Horsfall-type furnace and could consume 10 tons of refuse a day, which was fed in through the top from a loading platform (“M. Charging doors in the diagram below). Pollution was further reduced by four “fume cremators”, coke-fired furnaces where a temperature of 800-1000°C was maintained to literally burn the smoke and destroy its empyreumatic components. At the base of the 185ft tall chimney was a cyclone-type dust-catching system.

There was space for a 150 ton stockpile on the site. Heat from the processes was used to generate steam, which drove a mill during the day to crush the furnace clinker into a commercially attractive size. At night it provided electric light to allow the work of destruction to carry on 24 hours a day. The baronial-style red sandstone building on Broughton Road was the stables for the twenty resident horses that pulled the city’s scaffie carts, scaffie being the Scots word for a scavenger or street cleaner. It was also designed to screen the offending Destructor plant behind it from the public’s view.

The Destructor was completed and ready for action up on the 14th August 1893, with Councillor Sloan of the Town Council, who had been instrumental in driving the plans through, having the honour of striking a ceremonial match to light the first furnace. It was estimated it would take the combustion cells an entire month to reach their peak operating rhythm. In practice it was not quite as perfect as it should have been on paper; the 80-100 tons a day promised were in practice more like 50-60 tons and the operating costs were not the promised 10d per ton, but 2/ 8¼d; over three times higher. In 1898 the city was producing 400 tons of refuse per day, so still ended up sending over three quarters of it to landfill in the shale mines of West Lothian around Pumpherston. This latter deficiency was not a failing of the Destructor though, the City Engineer had planned that it would be the first of four for the city, but the others were never provided.

The Destructor was closed in 1919 as the plant was life-expired and beyond economical repair, by which time it could only cope with 17% of the city’s refuse output. A new facility was commissioned on the site ten years later in 1929, where waste was first sorted to salvage textiles, paper, glass and metal and the remainder pulverised and compacted for landfill. Incineration was kept to a minimum on site. Ten years later, two similar facilities were provided at Russell Road in Roseburn and at Seafield. All three of these were closed in 1969 as being out of date and too expensive to operate, but particularly because they could not cope with the changes in what society was throwing away. Household fires were less common and therefore so was burning your own rubbish. In addition to this, “disposable” packagings, particularly plastic, were on the increase, as was a boom in consumer goods and a waning of the old fashioned reluctance to throw things away. An entirely new, high-tech and highly automated refuse disposal works was opened in 1971 on the Powderhall Destructor site.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/36844288@N00/51676190461

Here, the Corporation’s scaffie carts brought 600 tons a day of the what the city threw away to be to be sorted and incinerated. In 1980 the facility had to be upgraded to cope with 800 tons per day, with a shredding and baling plant installed to process waste for landfill.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/13460108@N06/16647924016

Here’s a striking aerial photo of the Powderhall incinerator at work, just look at that haze it’s casting over the city (bear in mind there is a primary school and nursery directly over Broughton Road from the plant). And this was the problem.

By 1986 the incinerator had been shut down due to a public campaign against it and changes in environmental legislation. Burning all kinds of waste in an urban environment came to be seen for what it was – an enormous public health and environmental risk. The chimney and plant were demolished but the rest of the facility remained in operation to process waste for landfill. As 100% of its output was now for landfill, the footprint of the incinerator and the site of the long closed Powderhall Station were turned into a transfer station to load the compacted waste onto railway containers for transport to landfill sites. These trains were known as Binliners and were in operation until 2016 when the Powderhall site closed for the final time and the city’s refuse moved to new recycling, sorting and, in a backward step, incineration facilities at Millerhill.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/127340508@N05/15916430602

The 1971 waste transfer station was demolished, but the stable block of the original destructor remains and is to be converted into workshops and artists studios. The rest of the site has been given over to a housing development, progress on which appears (as of 2024) to have stalled.

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