#railwaystations — Public Fediverse posts

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https://pablomartinezcalleja.blogspot.com/2025/04/una-estacion-una-atmosfera-una-emocion_27.html

#photography #Photo #visualart #fotografie #fotografia #colors #colours #couleurs #fictions #poetics #artberlin #artlondon #artparis #artmontreal #artbasel #artnewyork #NoToWar #ferrocarril #railway #Eisenbahn #train #tren #trenes #Zug #estacionesdetren #trainstations #railwaystations #gare
https://pablomartinezcalleja.blogspot.com/2026/04/una-estacion-una-atmosfera-una-emocion.html

#photography #Photo #visualart #fotografie #fotografia #colors #colours #couleurs #fictions #poetics #artberlin #artlondon #artparis #artmontreal #artbasel #artnewyork #NoToWar #ferrocarril #railway #Eisenbahn #train #tren #trenes #Zug #estacionesdetren #trainstations #railwaystations #gare
https://pablomartinezcalleja.blogspot.com/2026/07/una-estacion-una-atmosfera-una-emocion.html

Orepuki or Aropaki, Business & Industry - Orepuki Railway & Station Buildings, early 1900s

Orepuki or Aropaki, Business & Industry - Orepuki Railway and Station:

Black and White image of the Orepuki Railway, Post Office and Goods Shed, along with passengers who appear to be disembarking the train at this once upon a time major outpost in the Longwoods District. A group of unidentified shops (can anyone help with this?) sits to the far left of the photo, and it is likely this photograph was taken from the Water Tower. On the far right at the back is the now Orepuki Cafe building. The scene shown here is thought to be from the early 1900's. This image is in the Public Domain and was donated by a descendant of the original owner of the photo, the Brownridge Family.

OREPUKI RAILWAY & STATION MILESTONES:
Orepuki line and 'Fourth Class' Station opened 5th May 1885

Next major milestone in the railways branch line to Tūātapere, was opened on 23rd September 1909

FIRE… in 1941 the Station was badly damaged, rebuilt and upgraded

31 March 1942 - Station changed from officered to flag station (caretaker)

On 24 November 1951, Railways Department attempted to re-establish the station as Aropaki, the original name for Orepuki, but locals refused this

1954 - all passenger services ceased altogether through Orepuki (Tūātapere Branch line)

1960 - with the Post Office moving to its new site (now closed), the station was sold for dismantling. The Fire Brigade asked to retain the office portion

31 July 1976 line from Riverton to Orepuki & Tūātapere was closed down

The Water Tower was removed from the original site & rebuilt where it sits today (2025), it is in the process of once again being restored, thanks to funds from the Tūātapere Te Waewae Community Board being granted.

OREPUKI RAILWAY EARLIER HISTORY
According to 'From Goldfield to Fields of Green', by Marjory Smith, on 13 May 1872 it was confirmed "the construction of a tramway or light railway, from Riverton to the Orepuki Goldfield, would open up a large area of good agricultural land, and render the same available for settlement," forthwith.

But not everyone was happy, gold miners who relied on the land being available for diggings, saw the incoming influx of settlers and farmers as a threat to their livelihoods, as the land they were working would need to be given up to them. The 16 miles between the two settlements was set aside for a railway and sections of land on each side of this, was procured for the railway, before the workings commenced. The Southland Waste Lands Act of 1865 allowed for this. There was great excitement at the coming of the railway to what was then pretty much the wild west of Murihiku Southland.

There had been many claims of necessity made by those with interests in agriculture, shopkeeping, timber mills and even some championing the goldfields and the as yet untapped coal mining were clamouring for the railway to be constructed. Some of their claims were that this area of the southwest could easily provide all the timber needed for the whole of the Otago region, if only if could be easily transported after extraction, claims were made that there was 40-50,000 pounds of timber in the bush there. It was also claimed, the area was one of the richest goldfields in the whole country, and easily able to support 3-4,000 workers! Then the land itself, with a claim of there being 8-10,000 acres of land between The Waiau and Orepuki which could be used immediately for agricultural purposes. It was further claimed that the land would double in price when the rail arrived.

By 1873 it was reported that the railway workings had been put through the bush 2 1/2 miles from the Jacobs River Bridge at this point, so it is thought that construction had begun immediately upon the contract being secured. By 1874, there is news that part of the Orepuki Railway contract was awarded to a very familiar name in Railway history of the South Island, David Proudfoot. This part of the project was at a cost of 28,397 pounds.

The railway works proceeded every slowly onwards, through back-breaking bush and sinking swamps, creating many challenges for the builders. Along the way various other stations were opened up as the railway reached those settlements. Progress continued northwards and eventually by 1885, the line arrived at Orepuki.

On the 5th May 1885 the Orepuki section of the line was officially opened. It is noted that the Railway buildings at Orepuki included a goods shed and engine shed, a loading bank, crane and water tank. The wood and iron station was built with entrances which separated out the railway and post departments, there was a waiting room for the ladies, a public ticket lobby, a workroom for th...
Central and Western Murihiku Southland Archive via DigitalNZ

http://api.digitalnz.org/records/59743468/source

#OrepukiOrAropaki #WesternSouthland #Murihiku #Business #Railways #RailwayBuildings #Railroads #Mail #RailwayStations #GarfieldAnd #Black

“The Station Nobody Wanted”: the thread about Leith Central

Has there ever been a more remarkable railway terminus than Leith Central?

Sandy Mullay, The Station Nobody Wanted, Blastpipe No. 73, Scottish Railway Preservation Society, 1986.

If you stand in the car park of the Tesco supermarket at the foot of Easter Road, you could be forgiven for thinking the mighty walls you are confronted with are the remnant of some long-gone defensive rampart. And you’d be half right; they are a monument to a bitter and protracted corporate conflict waged in 19th century Scotland, a fortification thrown up by one combatant to deliberately keep another out of its territory. For these are the remains of Leith Central Station, about which everything was remarkable: its size, its cost, its short operational life, and the fact it was built by a company that never wanted it.

Leith Central owes its origins to the interminable struggle between Scotland’s two predominant Victorian railways: Edinburgh’s North British and Glasgow’s Caledonian. Wherever the two met, they fought: each built lines to block, circumvent or duplicate the other’s. The eventual result in Edinburgh and Leith was a confused spaghetti of railways that didn’t necessarily serve the travelling public well.

As the final decade of the nineteenth century approached, the North British had the upper hand in the east of the country. The completion of the Forth Bridge approached and the hostilities had somewhat fizzled out for the time being. They might have been forgiven for thinking their position in the city was unassailable; the Caley’s mainline had never got further east than its Edinburgh terminus of Princes Street Station and their route to Leith was by way of a circuitous backtrack of a branch. The NB was content with this situation but the Caley had other ideas and was hatching a plan to upset this status quo. They would build a fourth line to Leith and would do so in the most bold and direct manner: tunnelling east beneath Princes Street to a new underground station at Waterloo Place. From there they would continue staight through the Calton Hill and over London Road before turning towards the heart of Leith. And they wouldn’t stop there, they would press on to connect with their existing line at Newhaven, thus completing a circular suburban line around the north of Edinburgh. This would be a counterbalance to the NB’s suburban circle around the south of the city. The threat to the incumbent did not end there, crucially this scheme would give the aggressor a direct route to Leith docks from the east, wherein lay access to the black diamonds of the Midlothian coal traffic.

Leith Town Council was desperate for better transport links to the burgh and enthusiastically threw its support behind the plans. But the full weight of the Edinburgh establishment was dead set against them: they would defile Princes Street and the disruption would far outweigh any benefits. The city thus sought to scupper the scheme. This was a point not lost on the North British, to whom the Caley’s plan was a direct declaration of war in its own front yard. That railway didn’t really want to build another line to Leith, but came to realise one could be used as a means to ruin the Caley’s eastern aspirations once and for all. More importantly, it could be used as political leverage to get them what they truly desired and desperately needed. The completion of the Forth Bridge had shown the capacity and facilities of Waverley, what should have been their premier station, to be totally inadequate. Transport chaos was reigning there and a complete rebuild and expansion was urgently required.

What would become the Leith Central scheme was not therefore a stand-alone proposal. It was actually just one part of a wider bill, passed as the Waverley Station Extension Act 1891 on August 5th that year. With this the NB got what it wanted; Leith Central was the price it had to pay the Corporations of Edinburgh and Leith for their support. From the very beginning  it was thus an unusual railway, built not because there was any real need for it, or because it would make its operator any money, or because the company even wanted it. It was purely to be built to spite the competition.

The Act gave powers to acquire twelve acres of land in Leith for a new station – a whole block between Leith Walk and Easter Road, bounded by Duke Street to the north. A third of this was to be made available as compensation to the Caley; Leith Town Council remained naively hopeful that the two sworn enemies might come to terms and open a joint station. This area was already well developed and a significant amount of property would have to be acquired and demolished. This included the Central Hall, a billiards emporium that had begun life as a Methodist Chapel, and the Central Bar just around the corner. The railway agreed to provide the proprietor of the latter, John Doig, with a replacement establishment. To this day that remains called the Central Bar and Doig’s name is still to be found within the stained glass panels displayed in its windows.

If Leith thought it would get its new railway any time soon then it was badly mistaken. The NB was focussed on the Waverley redevelopment and so deliberately dragged their heels. Progress was glacial, especially by Victorian standards. They took five years to authorise the start of work, which did not begin until February 1896. It took eighteen more months to complete the plans and submit them for approval of Leith’s councillors. Despite the latter’s chagrin at the pace they were most pleased with what they saw. Their only amendments were to request a prominent public clock on the corner with Duke Street and the raising of the height of the approach bridge over Easter Road by two feet. The railway readily agreed to the first but counter-proposed on the second that the Burgh should instead lower the street level by fifteen inches. This was accepted and to maintain the existing thresholds the pavement was stepped down to the carriageway, something that has long caught out drinkers stumbling out of the Persevere bar.

The appointed engineers were Cunningham, Blyth and Westland of George Street, who had recently completed the new North Bridge and doubled the approach tunnels to Waverley. In September 1898 the Railway Times reported that demolition works had concluded and initial construction begun on the station’s frontage onto Leith Walk (200 feet long) and Duke Street (220 feet). This was the only part of the project completed in any sort of haste: by the summer of 1899 its commercial premises were being let and bringing in valuable rental income. Work did not commence on the actual branch line from Waverley until 1901, a decade after the Act of Parliament. The pace remained positively lethargic and it took two further years to complete that mile of track.

As Leith Central began slowly to rise from the ground though, it was clear for all to see that the scale of it was staggering. It was 830 feet long from end-to-end. Its footprint was 15,900 square metres (about 4 acres), making it almost a quarter the size of Waverley. It was just a smidgen smaller than the Caley’s Princes Street terminus (16,500 square metres) and totally dwarfed Haymarket (8,400 square metres), the NB’s second station in the city.

The concourse and platforms were raised up to first floor level to allow the approach tracks to cross over Easter Road. Offices and waiting rooms were at this level and there was 4,500 square feet of vault space beneath. In sharp contrast to the notoriously low and claustrophobic Waverley, the whole lot was topped off with a lofty glass roof it engineered by none other than Sir William Arrol and Co. who had built the Forth Bridge. Rising above the four storey tenements adjacent, author Alasdair Wham described it as a “huge glass cavern over sixty feet high… which broadened from 100 feet at the Easter Road end to more than double that width”. A Scotsman columnist would later write “when a gale is blowing off the [Forth], the whole roof rattles and groans“. Despite the vast scale though there were only four platforms, although each was 790 feet long. The interior was electrically lit and so was the clock – the latter at the request of Leith Town Council who agreed to pay the meter.

Above the frontage on Duke Street were two further storeys containing flats for railway servants. The rear windows of these looked down upon the concourse and there was a private stairway down to platform level. One of the more notable occupants would be a clerk called George Mathers who in 1935 he was elected as MP for Linlithgowshire. He boasted to the newspapers that his commute to London was unique: he could get from his “own back door” to London Kings Cross without ever stepping out from a station and “getting his feet wet“.

The station was advantageously located at the Foot O’ the Walk with its principal public entrance was on the corner below its clock. Around the corner there was a ramp up to a vehicle entrance on the corner of Crown Place and from Easter Road there was a further entrance giving access through a subway beneath the tracks. (the extreme length of the station however gave a rather long hike to reach trains from this direction.)

To control the complex arrangement of approach tracks and carriage sidings, there was an 81-lever signal box located at track level at the eastern end. This also controlled access to a turntable on the opposite side of Easter Road, used for turning locomotives around at the end of their journey.

As 1903 dawned, Leith Town Council was frustrated that it was still not open. They wrote to the railway in April to enquire when that might change; the reply came that Major Pringle of the Board of Trade would begin his approval inspection on May 30th. This passed off without difficulty and opening was finally set for July 1st. The North British was now confronted with a final bill as monumental as the building: £500,000 (c. £57 million in 2026). This was a huge sum for the time, to put it into context it was a third of what the entire reconstruction of Waverley had set them back. The company had a long-standing reputation for this sort of spendthriftness, much to the frustration of its shareholders.

Yet the North British was also notoriously penny-pinching, and they took this to extremes in the utterly minimal effort they put into the opening of Leith Central. There was little in the way of advance advertising; a stationmaster had not yet been appointed; only a single ticket window was staffed and the refreshment rooms remained shuttered. No ceremony was arranged, and the Town Councils of Edinburgh and Leith weren’t even invited. On the appointed Wednesday morning, the 5:55AM to Waverley simply departed the station as the new timetable stated it would and that was that. The Edinburgh Evening Dispatch likened the little engine that pulled the first train out of the huge station to a “Skye Terrier pup in its four storey kennel“.

Such was the railway’s disinterest that they didn’t even bothered to open the entrances! Instead a single, poorly-signed and half-hidden door served as the only way in or out. This caused problems to members of the public who were trying to find their way in. The Rev. Thomas Crerar of North Leith United Free Church soon wrote to the company to complain that he had been unable to find it and instead “accidentally” found himself in the Central Bar. To begin with the only service offered was a shuttle service to Waverley. This took just 6 minutes from Leith (uphill) and 5 minutes on the return (downhill). These trains were nicknamed Penny Jerks on account of the short, sharp journey, but their frequency – just twice an hour – was poor. The Saturday service was lighter yet, but on the opening week a one-off excursion was run to Portobello and Musselburgh. Come the Sabbath however and the gates remained firmly locked to the travelling public, a precedent that was maintained for the entirety of its working life.

Despite their best efforts to discourage patronage the NB soon found they had a hit on their hands. Almost 16,000 tickets were sold in the first four days. The reason proved obvious – the competing tramway to Edinburgh remained horse-drawn for half the route before a change on to Edinburgh’s cable system; the infamous Pilrig Muddle. Slowly the railway began to respond to the success of their massive investment. Within a month they opened the main entrance beneath the clock, followed shortly thereafter by that on Easter Road. In September a permanent station master was appointed: Alexander Somerville from Abbeyhill. The same month the list of destinations was expanded by making Central the start and end point of the half-hourly “circle” services that ran around the Suburban & Southside Junction line (aka the South Sub). This was an operational benefit to the railway as previously trains had to be held at Waverley for 15 minutes, time instead used for the additional revenue-making run to Leith. Abbeyhill thus became the only intermediate direct stop between Central and Waverley, although space had been left between the tracks for another at Hawkhill. Finally, in December a second ticket window was opened.

The revised circle service proved a success too, having hitherto been rather unpopular. As a result the prices were lowered a new “Zone Ticket System” for regular commuters was introduced. It also allowed the old South Leith Station to finally be closed, its handful of services to and from Midlothian being relocated to Central. Further expansion of the destination list was limited to extending a few Glasgow and Dundee services through from Waverley. Thus for most of its life, Leith Central essentially remained an outsize terminus for weekday local commuters, punctuated by occasional busy spells for holiday, excursion and football specials.

Much of the initial bump of success was at the company’s own expense however: the North British found patronage at their North Leith station on Commercial Street suffered a 20% drop. The truth was that Leith only had so many passengers to offer and while the new station provided the quickest route to Edinburgh they were happy to use it. But the NB seemed content with this arrangement; they had seen off the challenge from the Caley and now they could sit back and profit from the lack of direct competition with minimal further effort.

On May 23rd 1915, Leith Central had the grim honour of receiving the first of over 120 local victims who had lost their lives in the Quintinshill Railway Disaster the previous day. These were the remains of the men of A & D Companies, 1/7th Royal Scots, a unit formed largely of volunteers from Leith. Most had departed the same station just a month earlier for Stenhousemuir, where they would complete their basic training before being ordered to the front at Gallipoli. On their return they were taken the short distance to a makeshift morgue in the Battalion’s drill hall on Dalmeny Street. This catastrophe caused an estimated 227 deaths and 246 injuries: the worst rail disaster in British history. The shattered remnants of the regiment would return through Leith Central once more after the war’s end to a heroes welcome.

When peace returned, the NB’s still maintained its competitive advantage on the Leith to Edinburgh traffic, but not for long. In 1922 the Pilrig Muddle was finally resolved after 28 years when Leith was integrated into Edinburgh’s new electric tramway. This caught the railway not just caught napping, but fast asleep: the “cars” served far more destinations, more frequently, were much faster for cross-town journeys and were cheaper.

The effect on Central’s traffic was immediate; it crashed. With its principal source of revenue largely poached, it was now patently obvious to any remaining doubters what Leith Central really was:

A massive White Elephant

W. A. C. Smith, writing about Leith Central in “Edinburgh’s Last Days of Steam”, 2003

The NB has been accused of taking its eye off the ball, however perhaps this can be excused. It was a time of great upheaval in the industry and it was facing a far more existential threat than trams. In 1923 the Government took the drastic action known in as “The Grouping“, which rationalised over one hundred companies into just four in an effort to make them profitable. The NB found itself merged into the new London and North Eastern Railway (LNER). This vast new organisation had much more pressing matters to worry about as than a provincial commuter station (even a very big one). They would therefore refrain from efforts to try and stimulate new sources of traffic on or modernise the Central branch and it remained steam worked until the end.

With not much to do around the place, one of the station master’s principal duties appears to have been holding the keys for the large numbers of flats and shops for let within the station. The railway tried to find uses for the excess of unused space around the place. A number of rooms were given over for training of their volunteer ambulance teams and competitions between the different stations were frequently held here. They also used it for the annual auction of the unclaimed lost property from across their network. The Evening News reported on a real Ali’s cave of bargains up for grabs. Lots ranged from expected items such as watches, golf clubs, tennis rackets, umbrellas, musical instruments, suitcases, spectacles, prams, bicycles and jewellery to the more unusual: deck chairs, a trouser press, a sewing machine, a wheelbarrow, false teeth, a basket of pot lids, a bell tent, sails for a yacht and even a collapsible boat!

For most of the ‘twenties and ‘thirties, Central lived the life of a quiet, if vast, backwater. That changed in 1937 when it had its most eventful and unusual year. On June 23rd there was a “melee” outside when a party of Fascists – intent on making a public speech – was met, surrounded and attacked by the Leith Mob. Police who had been waiting for the trouble in the station took some time to restore order. On August 6th a workman, George Fraser of 53 Dumbiedykes Road, was killed when he fell through the station roof onto the platform below. He landed on his colleague Robert Beveridge, also of Dumbiedykes Road, who was seriously injured as a result.

On 29th October there was a serious early-morning fire, which spread from a waiting room and took nine hours to extinguish. Firefighters had to contend with the panes of glass in the roof above shattering in the heat and raining down shards upon them. When the smoke cleared it was found that the timber facings and decking of two of the platforms had been destroyed for a length of 112 yards. Five coaches and three horse vans were also burnt out. Little in the way of permanent damage was done though and services were back up and running the next day at 9AM. The same cannot be said for the resident pigeon population however, most of whom were asphyxiated by the smoke. A further fire in the roof on 30th November was more minor and was brought under control by a single fire engine, causing just £100 of damage.

The station had a relatively quiet war, with services cut back and the Easter Road entrance closed for reasons of economy. The long platforms meant it was regularly used for troop and hospital trains. The sales of lost property were particularly competitive during wartime as eager buyers sought to get items that were no longer readily available, particularly clothing.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/127340508@N05/47179713432

When peace returned the 1946/47 timetable issued by the LNER would be their penultimate. It shows the Jerks were week days only, with a small number of services working morning, mid-day and evening commuter patterns. There were twelve services per day from Leith. Three in the morning (the first at 5:41); five around mid-day including and four for the evening – the last departing at 18:10. There was a single through-train to Glasgow each day. From Edinburgh there were ten trips in the opposite direction; four for the morning (the first at 7:21), four for the mid-day and two in the evening, the last at 18:55. There were seven departures from Leith a day on the Suburban “outer circle” line, and ten in the opposite direction. As with the Jerks, these were concentrated in morning, mid-day and the early evening. The last train left Central each week day at 18:11, the last arrived at 19:00. On Saturdays the service was lighter yet and on Sunday there remained no service at all.

The following year, the second major change of ownership came and on 1st January 1948 the railways were nationalised. The first timetables issued by the new British Railways basically maintained the LNER’s scant service pattern at the station. An unusual visitor arrived in 1948 when an exhibition of new and unusual rolling stock was put on for the public. The star draw was the Silver Princess, a modern American showcase design built by the Budd company and with a striking exterior finish of polished, corrugated stainless steel.

Nationalisation ushered in a new era for the railways but for Leith Central it meant rationalisation. It was an obvious early candidate for cost cutting and in March 1952 the Scottish Region announced that all services would be withdrawn from April 7th that year: less than fifty years after they began. An alternative but lengthier route from Edinburgh to Leith would be maintained on the former Caledonian line from Princes Street Station to North Leith (which at this time was confusingly renamed Leith North!) Parcels traffic was re-routed to Waverley station and delivered onwards to Leith from there. The Scostman reported “there was a melancholy air of impending dissolution in the Central. A train was being prepared to go out on its journey through the suburbs. There is only one full-scale train a day from the Central – the 12:45 to Glasgow.” In a somewhat appropriate symmetry to the occasion of its opening, there were no ceremonials at closing. Just four years later, the last of the city’s trams would also be withdrawn: they had killed off Leith Central decades before and in turn were killed off by a deliberate policy of “busification”.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/127340508@N05/49512520986/in/photolist-2irfBuW-2j3H7or-2npqwSM-XVEzW3-2kBmVuA-2orYhB6-2jkWLwJ-2aygLjN-2g4gbQM-SPyAj3-2nCsqbD-2dfiX7F-FwivHN-2jtQsbn-2jw5G61-2nu2SFg-2b4tbsC-2aXH8NC-2kBKrxP-2meizEe-ahQGYA-2iYw7be-2quoJrq-2ipAoMz-2paa5NZ-2kDaDxT-2dpLx5y-2n2zfV2-2mUEF4F-2iUACkS-2o2HJpX-2k8kAxP-G6z1jy-GatKs7-PiB7sG-2gwqdWb-2nhKRBh-2kUDVE1-2fcYeZR-2hjD4kK-QTDKkb-7KdeUY-2jURgV5-2h7TCiT-2jeutfC-2hAwefp-e3wHHc-Q9MAQr-2qyhwf1-ZFF1re

Curiously, despite the removal of all its services, the station actually remained in use and the Outer Circle suburban trains continued to start and finish their journeys there: but the carriages were empty and you couldn’t get on or off! For a few years the place was used for such marshalling of services as well as the storage and cleaning of coaching stock. A new purpose came in 1955 when work began to convert it to a dedicated maintenance facility (code 64H) for the new generation of diesel rail cars. These were taking over Edinburgh’s remaining suburban rail routes and also those to Glasgow. The depot also served as a training school for these new vehicles. It’s somewhat ironic that these were exactly the sort of modern, efficient units that really could have benefited the station when it was in operation.

The new era would prove to be even shorter than the first. Edinburgh’s suburban rail network was cut back to almost nothing over the coming decade, the last services running in 1968, and in 1972 the Glasgow multiple units were replaced by locomotive stock. Much of Leith Central Depot’s work therefore evaporated before it ever really got going and it closed in 1972, its few remaining duties relocated to Millerhill and Haymarket.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/127340508@N05/49362392322/

A final passenger service had been worked on October 16th 1971, a special put on for enthusiasts, but in April the next year once again Central was closed without ceremony and found itself abandoned. The access bridge over Easter Road was removed within the year, definitely precluding any further railway usage.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/127340508@N05/54917798746/

The railways could be a dangerous place to work and there were a number of fatalities at Leith Central and along its branch during its operational life.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/127340508@N05/16881499619/

Plans did not take long to materialise for the next phase of Leith Central’s life. In March 1973 the Scotsman reported that Bovis Properties (Scotland) Ltd proposed to clear the site and redevelop it in an £8 million scheme for shops, offices and a 500 space car park. This ultimately came to nothing and in 1974 BR told the same paper they were “re-exploring the possibilities“. “Re-exploration” took four years and it was not until 1978 that Edinburgh District Council announced they were in negotiations to acquire the site and turn it into “Britain’s biggest indoor sports stadium“. This ambitious £6 million proposal would cater for twenty-seven different pursuits and would have included a central multi-purpose main arena with athletics track and further arenas for general sports, carpet bowls and squash. There would be two practice halls, a training gym and even a “projectile range“. The Council purchased the site for £440,000 in 1979 and spent a further £160,000 on planning.

The scheme was proposed by a Conservative controlled council, but in an odd reversal for the usual precedent of British politics it found itself cancelled by pressure from Labour ranks. This happened in April 1982 on account of ballooning costs and a lack of funds. The station had now been abandoned for a decade and was succumbing to the vandals as the authorities tried to work out a future for it.

With their sports centre scheme dead in the water, in 1983 the District decided to dispose of the problem site on the private housing market. There was an initial flurry of interest but only a single, derisory offer was forthcoming, one that less than half what the authority had paid for it. 1980s Leith was severely economically depressed and was already awash with brownfield residential development opportunities. The District reluctantly approved the sale to Barratt Developments but this was blocked in 1984 by an incoming Labour administration.

Once again it was back to the drawing board for Leith Central, which now entered the final and most notorious chapter of its life. Its vast interior was reduced to the haunt of alcoholics and drug addicts and would be immortalised in Irvine Welsh’s 1993 novel Trainspotting. The title comes from the chapter “Trainspotting at Leith Central Station“, a sardonic joke on the fact there had been no trains to spot there in twenty years. While the station plays a symbolic part in the story, representative of “a disintegrating and ignored community“. In the prequel, Skagboys, the character Spud will misidentify the former Caley railway bridge crossing Leith Walk as “the auld line ootay Leith Central Station“.

The Labour District Council proposed a new scheme in 1986 that included a 30,000 square foot supermarket to help fund a new leisure centre. This proposal was immediately delayed however when Lothian Regional Council counter-proposed a new Leith Academy secondary school nearby that included community sports and recreation facilities, including a pool. Updated plans were made public the following year for a £12m scheme for a 35,000 square foot supermarket and a leisure pool (“the finest in Scotland“). All but the listed station buildings along Leith Walk and Duke Street, and northern retaining wall, would be demolished. With very limited public funding available, a private sector partner was brought in to finance and build the scheme: Walker Construction (Scotland) Ltd of Livingston.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/52809440@N03/37552337810

Work was due to begin in October 1988 but an eleventh-hour spanner was thrown in the works when the Council was told that their intended leaseback financing for the pool was not viable. A revised financial package was approved in December; they would instead borrow £3m to build the shell of the pool themselves and Walkers would finance the interior fit-out and plant, which would be leased back. The Scottish Development Agency (SDA) contributed £1.4 million to clear and level the site, with the Supermarket being financed entirely privately.

The Trainspotting years came to an end in January 1989 when Dalton Demolition moved in and got to work. In March two passers-by were hospitalised and three cars were written-off when a 63 foot section of the station wall collapsed onto Duke Street. The contractors salvaged the station’s dressed stone and offered it for sale. Some pieces were acquired by the Scottish-Italian artist and sculptor Eduardo Paolozzi who had been born next door in Crown Place. He incorporated them into the planting around his Manuscript of Monte Cassino sculpture outside St Mary’s Cathedral on Picardy Place. These stones were later relocated to London Road Gardens when the roads and public realm here were changed during the redevelopment of the St James Centre area. The statues were returned but the stones still languish forgotten and out of context there, with a nearby plaque commemorating the former Picardy Place roundabout!

In March 1990 Scotmid Co-operative were announced as the operators of the new supermarket and opened their doors on July 31st 1991. The leisure pool, by now Christened Leith Waterworld, was somewhat delayed and did not open until May 1992. In August that year, the final part of the station redevelopment began when the gap in the tenements on Easter Road, where the railway tracks had once burst through at first floor level, was filled with a new 5-storey block of flats. If you look closely at the façade of this block you will notice large pieces of sandstone inserted in it – these come from the station.

Much like its railway predecessor, Leith Waterworld was a grand facility that had taken a long time and a lot of money to build. It too was initially highly popular with the public but was also was unlikely to have ever been profitable. It operated at a deficit from day one and by 2004 was losing £1,500 a day. In was an all too familiar tale, its operators cut back opening hours to reduce losses, but this made it ever-harder for it to pay its way. Like the station before it, the leisure pool proved to have a similarly short service life. It closed after just 20 years in 2012 despite a spirited campaign to keep it open (and re-open it as a community-owned facility afterwards). It was bitter compensation to future generations that its closure was used to finance the refurbishment of the diving facilities at the Royal Commonwealth Pool ahead of the 2014 Commonwealth Games.

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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These threads © 2017-2026, Andy Arthur.

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Fingal Railway Station c.2010. I thought I'd heard something about it being restored for community use but when I went to check I ended up in places no one should have to look at.

#TemporaryPictures #Fingal #Tasmania #RailwayStations

Site of the railway station near Clarendon Estate, northern #Tasmania

Passenger rail services ended in 1978. Many of the stations, specially the smaller ones, have since been removed. Some have been reused. Others just sit there, unloved.

#RailwayStations #TemporaryPictures

Northern Railways and Indus Towers Strengthen Women’s Hygiene Access Across 175 Railway Stations

#TycoonWorld #NorthernRailways #IndusTowers #NariSamman #WomenHygiene #MenstrualHealth #CSRInitiative #RailwayStations #WomenEmpowerment #SanitaryNapkins #IoTTechnology #PublicHealth #GenderInclusion #WomenTravelers #PragatiCSR #SocialImpact #HealthAndHygiene #IndianRailways #SustainableDevelopment #CommunitySupport

https://tycoonworld.in/northern-railways-and-indus-towers-strengthen-womens-hygiene-access-across-175-railway-stations/

Saturday, April 25, 2026

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

Soon go home

#Photography #BlackAndWhite #Monochrome #UrbanPhotography #RailwayStations #Brisbane

4 historic train stations reimagined as luxury hotels http://dlvr.it/TPJHFV #RailNews #RailTravel #RailwayStations #BBC

When transiting at the Gare d'Amiens 🇫🇷 🚆

#TrainStations #RailwayStations #France #VisitEurope #PhotoOfTheDay #Photography #PhotoDiary #PhotoJournal #LifeInPictures

Monday, October 6, 2025

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

Last railway station is Pompei

#RailwayStations #TravelPhotos

(New theme?)

The Bastille in Paris was destroyed about 1790, but there are some remains. In the Metro station of the same name, there is part of the foundation and a line on the platform showing the outline of a moat wall.

#RailwayStations #TravelPhotos #Paris

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.

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.
Or please do just share this post on social media or amongst friends and like-minded people, sites like this thrive on being shared.

Explore Threadinburgh by map:

These threads © 2017-2026, Andy Arthur.

NO AI TRAINING: Any use of the contents of this website to “train” generative artificial intelligence (AI) technologies to generate text is expressly prohibited. The author reserves all rights to license uses of this work for generative AI training and development of machine learning language models.

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.

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.
Or please do just share this post on social media or amongst friends and like-minded people, sites like this thrive on being shared.

Explore Threadinburgh by map:

These threads © 2017-2026, Andy Arthur.

NO AI TRAINING: Any use of the contents of this website to “train” generative artificial intelligence (AI) technologies to generate text is expressly prohibited. The author reserves all rights to license uses of this work for generative AI training and development of machine learning language models.

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.

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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.

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.
Or please do just share this post on social media or amongst friends and like-minded people, sites like this thrive on being shared.

Explore Threadinburgh by map:

These threads © 2017-2026, Andy Arthur.

NO AI TRAINING: Any use of the contents of this website to “train” generative artificial intelligence (AI) technologies to generate text is expressly prohibited. The author reserves all rights to license uses of this work for generative AI training and development of machine learning language models.