This weekend was the 50th anniversary of the closure of the “Waverley Route”, the mainline railway from Edinburgh to Carlisle via Hawick (part of which is now the non-mainline “Borders Railway”). This old timetable from 1961 says a lot:
Contrast and compare how many places were actually served with how infrequent and patchy the services were. It’s no wonder people in these areas had been turning to buses (and then cars) for years.
Here’s the northern and central section of the route, notice it’s not just the through mainline, but the loop from Hardengreen (south of Dalkeith) to Peebles via Leadburn, and connections to the west (CR blue) and east (NER green)
The southern section was as wild and remote as many a highland line, bleak moors and hills with little stations in the middle of nowhere serving distant and dispersed communities. But the railway went out of its way to serve isolated market towns like Langholm and Jedburgh .
Slap bang in the centre of that last image is Riccarton Junction, at a remote fork in the railway where the mainline south to Carlisle met a single track line (the grandly titled “Border Counties Railway) running southeast to Hexham and then on to Newcastle.
Riccarton Junction is a fascinating place, a small, perfectly-formed railway community literally in the middle of nowhere, with no road access but a school, shop and post office and all the other basic trappings of civilisation.
This was hill farming community, with little farms and shepherd’s houses dotted around a landscape of moors and tracks. Riccarton Junction was a convenient place on the line to provide the services (watering, coaling) required to run a steam railway across such demanding terrain
“Convenient” in the sense it was at a natural junction in the landscape and a reasonable distance from either end. Otherwise it’s totally inconvenient! With everything (including people) coming in and out by train.
Around 30 households lived at Riccarton Junction, with at least one member of each being a railway employee. They either serviced the locomotives or were on the permanent way gangs maintaining the rails themselves – a full time occupation in such hostile territory.
The station was on a large island platform, grand for somewhere whose main purpose was to serve the rail community and allow passengers to change to/from the Border Counties branch. Here’s a grainy picture taken in 1901 – see the houses in the background
Looking down across the community and the junction from the hills above – the sidings served a civil engineer’s depot, a small loco shed, and allowed marshalling of the rolling stock for local “pick up” trains serving the rural stations north and south.
The Borders County line closed in 1958 – a single track through remote territory it was unsustainable. Beyond its railway purposes, Riccarton Junction was now only a curiosity for the traveller, no reason to get off or change trains if you didn’t have to.
The platform buildings also housed the village co-op shop and post office. You can see from the timetable at the top of the thread that the station now got just a handful of services a day; early morning departures for older schoolchildren, workers and shoppers.
A lunchtime and an afternoon return and probably 1 in the evening too – with only a handful being “through” trains, others being locals to/from Hawick and Carlisle.
The line was served by the daily “Thames – Forth Express”, from St. Pancras to Edinburgh via Sheffield and Carlisle, later named “The Waverley”, but that went right through Riccarton Junction without stopping
The big express trains would also pass through if they were diverted along the Waverley Route due to a closure of the East or West Coast mainlines, or when an enthusiast special was run. Here’s a Deltic milling around at Riccarton Junction
But with the Borders County Line closed, dieselisation and the general run-down of services prior to total closure of the Waverley Route as a “Beeching” economy, the writing was on the wall for the community at Riccarton Junction.
The line had never been a real commercial success – local passenger and agricultural traffic was always a real pittance, the area did not have the population to sustain a profitable railway – the border town kept the railway alive with their demand for coal to power the mills
But the mill industry too was struggling and either “modernised” with electricity, or switched its coal to lorries (and its goods too). From an accountant’s point of view the route was a wasteful duplication of a service to Carlisle and an unnecessary 3rd north-south mainline
I won’t go into the story of the closure of the Waverley route itself, it’s well kenned and if you don’t know it, the article on Wikipedia has plenty of details
Suffice to say, if you closed the route you killed the community…
Riccarton Junction is now abandoned, but (ironically) is served by a road built for forestry. This gave rise to attempts to lay some line and set up a small railway and museum in recent years but this sadly ended in acrimony and ultimately failure.
So that’s why if you look at Riccarton Junction on a map or aerial today, you’ll see a fork of intriguing, winding tracks through the plantations and what looks suspiciously like the remains of an old village.
And in case you’re getting any ideas about the reopening of the Borders County line to Newcastle, just don’t, they flooded it long ago with 44 bn gallons of water to create the UK’s largest reservoir; Keilder Water. It’s kind of an important thing for the northeast of England!
Here is Plashetts Station:
And unusually for such a rural station in an area far removed from the northeast coal fields, Plashetts had its own colliery, a small affair that produced steam coal up until the 1960s.
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