The Kilmarnock and Troon Railway (K&TR) was an early railway line in Ayrshire, Scotland. It was constructed to bring coal from pits around Kilmarnock to coastal shipping at Troon Harbour, and passengers were carried.
It opened in 1812, and was the first railway in Scotland to obtain an authorising act of Parliament; it would soon also become the first railway in Scotland to use a steam locomotive; the first to carry passengers; and the River Irvine bridge, Laigh Milton Viaduct, is the earliest railway viaduct in Scotland. It was a plateway, using L-shaped iron plates as rails, to carry wagons with flangeless wheels.
In 1841, when more modern railways had developed throughout the West of Scotland, the line was converted from a plateway to a railway and realigned in places. The line became part of the Glasgow and South Western Railway system. Much of the original route is part of the present-day Kilmarnock to Barassie railway line, although the extremities of the original line have been lost.
Origins By the early years of the 19th century, William Henry Cavendish Bentinck, Marquess of Titchfield had acquired extensive lands and other properties in Ayrshire and elsewhere. When his father died in 1809, he became the 4th Duke of Portland. He owned coal workings at Kilmarnock, and in these early years transport of minerals to market required the use of coastal shipping; Ireland was an important destination.
Already in 1790, about 40% of the 8,000 tons annual production went by horse and cart to the sea at Irvine. Kilmarnock is about from the sea, and about 1806 he started to make a harbour at The Troon (currently referred to as just Troon). He had earlier considered a canal connection to there from Kilmarnock, but had changed his intention to a railway.C F Dendy Marshall, A History of British Railways Down to the Year 1830, Oxford University Press, 1938, reprint 1971, 0 19 828254 0 He approached other landowners in the district to obtain their consent, and participation, in making a railway connection between Kilmarnock and the harbour, saying, "The plan to which I allude is for the purpose of making an iron rail road or railway from the Troon Point to Kilmarnock."Letter from Bentinck to Earl of Eglinton, dated 22 April 1806, quoted in Dendy Marshall.
These approaches were successful in obtaining the landowners' consent, although very little financial commitment:
The Marquess of Titchfield (i.e. Bentinck himself): 67 shares Lady Harriet Margaret Bentinck (his daughter): 10 shares Lord Montgomerie: 1 share The Earl of Eglinton: 1 share Colonel John Boyle of Shewalton: 1 shareCampbell Highet, The Glasgow and South Western Railway, Oakwood Press, Lingfield, 1965
The total subscribed capital was £38,500.
Bentinck appointed William Jessop as the engineer for the construction of the line; he had been engineer on the Surrey Iron Railway and the Croydon and Merstham railwayProf Sir Alec Skempton (ed), A Biographical Dictionary of Civil Engineers in Great Britain and Ireland – Volume 1: 1500 to 1830, Thomas Telford Publishing, London, 2002,
Early railways and tramways simply serving pits and running only over the land of the pit owner did not require special authority; in this case the new line would cross the land of other proprietors and through the Burgh of Troon and cross the turnpike road. Bentinck evidently thought it prudent to get the authorisation of an act of Parliament for his line; this may be due to the lukewarm support of his neighbours, and the earlier outright opposition of Colonel Fullarton of Crosbie Castle; Fullarton had died in 1808.C J A Robertson, The Origins of the Scottish Railway System, 1722 – 1844, John Donald Publishers Ltd, Edinburgh, 1983,
Bentinck got his act on 27 May 1808, when the Kilmarnock and Troon Railway was incorporated by the (48 Geo. 3. c. xlvi).An Act for making a Railway from or near to the Town of Kilmarnock, in the County of Ayr, to a Place called The Troon, in the said County, 48 Geo III The line thus became the first railway in Scotland to be authorised by an act of Parliament. On the same day he got his act for improving Troon Harbour, the Troon Harbour Act 1808 (48 Geo. 3. c. xlvii).
Construction Jessop's estimate for the construction of the line was £38,167 10s 0d. With the exception of Laigh Milton Viaduct at Gatehead, and soft ground at Shewalton Moss, the engineering works on the line were light.
The line was engineered "as a plateway at a time when other Scottish lines were using the edge rail".Robertson, but he is basing this on remarks made in 1824 by R Stevenson: the plate-rail is in use at the Troon road, but the edge-rail is more general, and is now often made of malleable iron: R Stevenson in Essays on Rail-roads, Transactions of the Highland Society, 1824.
The choice of the older technology may be due to the employment of William Jessop as engineer. He had built the Surrey Iron Railway, also a plateway. The wrought iron rails were L-shaped, and the upstand guided the wagons; the wagon wheels did not have flanges, which enabled them to be easily moved around terminal areas where there was hard standing, and to and from locations further from the railway. The plates were three feet long, with a four-inch width and a three-inch upstand (920 mm long by 100 mm by 76 mm). Highet says, "These plates or rails were joined with a square joint and were nailed to the foundation stones through small square holes formed half-way in each end of the rail." Clearly the plates were carried on sleeper blocks; the "nails" refers to pins fastened into timber plugs in holes drilled in the stone blocks. The gauge of the line (i.e. the dimension over the upstands) was . The route was nine miles six furlongs (15.7 km) in length.
Carter describes the line as "Laid with a wooden plateway, ... its wooden rails were replaced with iron ones in 1815", but this seems to diverge from other accounts.E F Carter, An Historical Geography of the Railways of the British Isles, Cassell, London, 1959
In January 1812, the Scots Magazine described the line, then not quite finished; it would be double track with frequent crossovers:
The road is to be double, or two distinct roads of four feet in width each, and laid four feet distance from each other, with frequent communications from the one road to the other, so as not only to admit of carriages going both ways, but to allow one carriage to pass another when both are travelling in one direction.
It would have a gentle gradient of about 1 in 660 (0.15%) falling towards Troon:
The total rise of the ground, from the Troon Harbour to Kilmarnock, is 80 or 84 feet, which is equally divided over the whole course of the road, so as to form it into an inclined plane, having a declivity of nearly eight feet, every mile.
The track is described in more detail:
The iron rails are 3 feet in length, and 40 lbs in weight each. Their horizontal base, on which the carriage wheels run, is 4 inches in breadth, and the ledge or parapet, rising perpendicular in the inner side of the rail, is also about 4 inches in height, raised in the centre, and declining at both ends of each rail, to add to its strength. [The rails] are not laid on sleepers of wood; but on solid blocks of stone, from 9 to 12 inches in thickness, and generally more than a foot square (in base and surface). The ground, on which these blocks are laid, is beat solid, and the stones are also beat down, after being laid, so as to give them all the solidity possible. The iron rails are bedded level on the blocks, and a hole about an inch and a quarter diameter, in the centre of each, six inches deep, is filled with a plug of oak; and a square niche being formed in the centre, at both ends of each of the rails, about half an inch above, and something narrower below, and when the ends of two of these rails are put together, the niches in each of the two rails, form one hole about an inch in length, and more than half an inch in breadth, contracting a little below; and these being placed over the plug of wood, in the centre of the block of stone, a nail is fixed into it, the head of which exactly fills up the holes in the ends of the two rails, and the holes and heads of the nails, being broader above than below, they keep the rails solid and firm on their beds. The space of four feet between the rails is filled with road metal for the horse, to near the top of the ledges of the rails, and the outside to the sole of the rails.The Scots Magazine and Edinburgh Literary Miscellany, Volume LXXIV, Edinburgh, 1812
The majority of the rails for constructing the line were made by the Glenbuck Iron Company; by 1813 they had been paid £13,345 for about 72,000 rails; this was about a third of the entire engineering cost of building the line.
Opening and operation
The line was opened on 6 July 1812.Christopher Awdry, Encyclopaedia of British Railway Companies, Patrick Stephens Limited, Wellingborough, 1990, The construction process had taken four years, and cost £59,849, a 52% overspend.
The line operated as a toll road, so that independent carriers could place wagons on it, and pay for the facility. If a horse and cart could travel on it, so could the proprietors' cattle: "No person [shall] be allowed to drive cattle along the Railway ... excepting the proprietors, the members of the Committee of management, and the officers of the Company."Company regulation quoted in Robertson
The American observer Strickland, writing in 1826, noted an obvious problem of a horse plateway:
The attendant and horse paths are four feet in width, and are raised or made up to a level with the top of the flange. From this mode of construction, the flat part of the rail is frequently filled with dirt and gravel; so much so, as to be little better than a common hard road. Horses only are used as the propelling power, and they convey thirteen wagons in convoy, each containing about one ton, at the rate of two and a half miles per hour. This reduced speed is occasioned principally by the great friction caused by the broad construction of the rails, and the wheels of the wagons come in contact, which is constantly thrown off from the horse path. Besides the rail wagons, common carts are introduced upon the rails; which has a very injurious effect, arising from the roughness of the tire of their wheels, and from the soil which adheres to them being deposited on the flat part of the rails.William Strickland, Reports on Canals, Railways, Roads and Other Subjects, H C Carey and I Lea, Athenaeum of Philadelphia, 1826, quoted in Dendy Marshall
Notwithstanding any shortcomings, the railway paid a dividend of 5% in 1817, and paid the same or better every year except 1858 and 1859 for the rest of the century. The company was bought out by the Glasgow and South Western Railway in 1899.
The Edinburgh Encyclopædia said, in 1832,
The only public railway of extent in Scotland, is that between the manufacturing town of Kilmarnock and the harbour of Troon; which, agreeably to act of Parliament, is open to all on payment of a certain toll.The Edinburgh Encyclopædia, first American edition, Joseph and Edward Parker, Philadelphia, 1832, volume XVI, p304; the Railway section is understood to have been written by Robert Stevenson
Laigh Milton Viaduct
The only significant structure on the line was Laigh Milton viaduct over the river Irvine near Gatehead. This was described as a fine stone bridge of four arches, of 40 feet span and rising 25 feet above the water.
When full locomotive operation was being implemented, it was replaced by a wooden bridge a little to the south, in order to ease the curve on the eastern approach. This bridge was in turn replaced in 1865 by the present structure, taking the railway still further south to ease the alignment.Roland Paxton and Jim Shipway, Civil Engineering Heritage: Scotland Lowlands and Borders, Thomas Telford Publishing, London, 2008, )
Passengers