Last rites on the colliston branch

An extract from the map for the Scottish Region’s winter 1955/56 public timetable shows the Arbroath & Forfar line from the North Sea coast to Guthrie, and then to Forfar as part of the Aberdeen-Perth main line. A gallant survivor east of Guthrie, 10 January 1955 had seen both the Dundee-Forfar through route and Blairgowrie branch lose their passenger services, so both go unseen, and in fact passenger closures had rather ‘uncluttered’ the map – as well as Blairgowrie, the ‘lost’ towns of Edzell (a passenger closure of September 1938), Inverbervie and Alyth (January and July 1951), and Kirriemuir and Brechin (August 1952) are shown; all remained open for goods. However, there is no mention for Careston, a terminus on a truncated Forfar-Brechin route, nor any locations on the two other goods-only lines from Dundee, to Newtyle and Alyth, and to Forfar. Oakwood Visuals Collection

If I may, I’d like to break with convention and start at the end, the end of timetabled passenger services that is. The line in the spotlight here is the former Arbroath & Forfar Railway, which on Saturday, 3 December 1955 found itself unable to retain a foothold on the British Railways (Scottish Region) passenger network and thus the ‘last rites’ in terms of passenger services were at hand – it was a case of catch a train that day or miss the chance.

I have a long association with this ancient route and a fondness gained from first travelling this way sometime in mid-1943 – you may recall my article ‘Boyhood journeys between Arbroath and Kirriemuir’ in the October 2012 issue of Steam Days. It is with that in mind, and having already delivered some of the 19th century history from the line’s first days in November 1838 and onward, that I think it appropriate to jump ahead rather more than a century to when the railway was a million miles on from horse-drawn carriages, a 5ft 6in gauge that even in 1848 was seen as a wrong turn (to be fair, there had been no ‘standard’ gauge a decade earlier) and jump ahead into the time of its sixth master, British Railways. In truth, not much had changed for some years as former Caledonian Railway 0-4-4T tank engines were the order of the day in all the time that I knew the route