The Slamannan Railway was an early mineral railway between the north-eastern margin of Airdrie and Causewayend on the Union Canal, near Linlithgow, Scotland.
The Slamannan Railway was built to give access for minerals from pits in the Slamannan area to market in Glasgow (over connecting railways) and Edinburgh (over the Union Canal), and it also briefly provided an early passenger connection between Glasgow and Edinburgh in association with other railways and the canal. It had a rope-worked incline at Causewayend.
The line opened on 31 August 1840. It crossed very thinly populated moorland, and it was dependent on promised mineral extraction on its own route, but this proved disappointing, and traffic was limited by the extended route over other railways westward, and transshipment to the canal eastward. It was never successful commercially, and in 1848 it combined with other companies, forming the Monkland Railways.
None of the route is still in use, and much of it near Airdrie has been obliterated by modern open-cast mineral extraction.
Origins In the first decades of the nineteenth century, there was a considerable increase in coal and iron ore extraction, and of iron smelting, in the general area of Coatbridge and Airdrie, and improvements in the efficiency of the process of iron manufacture led to accelerating demand for coal and iron ore, which in turn emphasised the weakness of the means of transport of the heavy materials. In 1771 the Monkland Canal had opened between the Airdrie pits and Glasgow, and it was followed by the Forth and Clyde Canal in 1790. In 1826 the Monkland and Kirkintilloch Railway (M&KR) was opened, conveying the minerals to the canal at Kirkintilloch for onward transport to Glasgow and Edinburgh.
In 1828 the Ballochney Railway gave access from pits north and east of Airdrie to the M&KR and thence onward to the canal; and in 1831 the Garnkirk and Glasgow Railway was opened, giving a more direct rail connection to Glasgow, but terminating at Townhead canal wharf there. In 1831–2 the Edinburgh and Dalkeith Railway opened, giving access from pits in the Eskbank and Dalhousie areas to Edinburgh and Leith.
Coal and iron deposits were being worked on a small scale in the Slamannan area, about halfway between Airdrie and Linlithgow; it was then in Stirlingshire, now in Falkirk District. Seeing the success of the other railways, businessmen interested in the pits promoted a railway to open up their own district, and they formed the Slamannan Railway Company. It was to run from a junction with the Ballochney Railway near Arbuckle, north-east of Airdrie, to a wharf on the Union Canal at Causeway End (nowadays spelt Causewayend), from Edinburgh. Thus it would give transport access for pits on the line to Glasgow (over the Ballochney and Monkland and Kirkintilloch lines) and to Edinburgh, by transshipping to the Union Canal at Causewayend.Don Martin, The Monkland & Kirkintilloch and Associated Railways, Strathkelvin District Libraries and Museums, Glasgow, 1995,
The promoters anticipated a relatively frequent horse-drawn one-coach passenger service between Airdrie and Causewayend. The undulations on the route would allow the horse to ride on the downhill sections:
The drawing horse [would be] carried behind the coach in a covered stable waggon. In this way a single Horse would be enabled to perform the journey from Airdrie to Causewayend with a Passenger Carriage once a day, and allowing for spare Horses, five opportunities per day could be given at the expense of maintaining six Horses, with the means of conveying from 130 to 140 Passengers each way daily.Slamannan Railway Prospectus, October 1835, quoted in Martin
The company is authorised
The company was incorporated by the (5 & 6 Will. 4. c. lv) on 3 July 1835 with a share capital of £86,000 and loan capital of £20,000. The proprietors had presented the bill to Parliament with the minimum of publicity, and no subscription list had been prepared. Thomas Grahame had said that "The scheme is so obviously advantageous that the subscriptions would be easily filled up."
The Slamannan Railway Act 1835 specified that work on construction could not start until the estimated cost of construction was fully subscribed, and this forced a delay until mid-1836, and first contracts were not let until October. John Benjamin Macneill (later to be called "the Father of the Irish railway system") was appointed principal engineer and Thomas Telford Mitchell was Resident Engineer.Whishaw; he spells Macneill "M'Neill", the common orthography for "Mac" surnames at the time.
At the annual general meeting in February 1838 it was reported that one of the two construction contractors had failed to achieve the required output, and part of his contract was taken over by the company directly; however a year later it was stated that both contractors had failed to achieve the required progress, and moreover that almost the whole of the subscribed capital had been expended. A further act of Parliament, the (2 & 3 Vict. c. lvii), was obtained in July 1839, authorising total share capital of £140,000 and the usual additional one-third of the value in borrowings.The Railway Chronicle, 20 May 1848, quoted in Robertson
The construction process had been painful, the company "suffered during construction from 'considerable difficulty' in obtaining land, procrastinating contractors, high material costs, and problems of money raising in the deepening depression of the late 1830s"Reports of the Committee of Management of the Slamannan Railway, 8 February 1838 and 7 February 1837, quoted in Robertson
The engineer Macneill reported to the committee of management that the nearby Wishaw and Coltness Railway had experienced difficulties with horse haulage by independent operators, referring to "the great confusion which always takes place on railways where a great number of horses are employed by persons of different interests". Prompted by Macneill, the thoughts of the committee turned to locomotive haulage, and to the possibility of a through passenger service between Glasgow and Edinburgh. This would require the co-operation of three other railways—the Garnkirk and Glasgow Railway (G&GR), the and the Ballochney Railway (BRly)—as well as the Union Canal Company. The was not encouraging.
Opening at last Eventually the contractors' difficulties were overcome, and on 30 July 1840 the directors, some shareholders, the directors of the Union Canal, and some engineers made a special journey throughout from the Garnkirk and Glasgow Railway's Townhead depot to Edinburgh over the G&GR, M&KR, BRly, the Slamannan line itself, and after transferring to a boat, the Union Canal. The railway part of this journey took 95 minutes to "Causeyend" (Causeway End) and
The directors of the Union Canal had subscribed some of the Slamannan capital and its parliamentary costs, and evidently saw collaboration with the Slamannan as being the future. They were evidently persuaded by this demonstration run, for on 4 August they ordered a larger passenger boat for the new intercity trade. The arrival in "Edinburgh" was of course at the canal's basin at Port Hopetoun, some distance from the city centre.
On 5 August 1840 the line opened, with a daily passenger train each way.
Operation
Passenger At first, the passenger trade seemed to boom, with the daily train leaving Townhead at 10:15 a.m. and the westbound journey starting by boat at 7:00 a.m. An omnibus ran from the centre of Edinburgh to connect, departing at 6:45 a.m. Fares were 7s 6d (first class and cabin on the boat), and 5s (second class and steerage). The journey took something over four hours, comparable with the stagecoach transit; a throughout boat trip over the Union Canal and the Forth and Clyde Canal continued in operation for the time being, taking 7½ hours. By October the Union Canal had procured a second boat and there were now two railway-and-canal journeys each way daily.
This was now the principal means of travel between the two great cities, involving a canal boat trip, the transit of three rope-worked inclines over four railway companies, and a railway running on stone block sleepers and, west of Arbuckle, finding a path among horse-drawn coal trains.
It was not long before a businessman started to operate a coach direct from Princes Street in Edinburgh to Causewayend, cutting 45 minutes off the journey (at a premium price) and of course by-passing the canal transit altogether. This proved popular, and the G&GR (apparently the driving force in this joint operation) encouraged the development of the stagecoach connection: the stagecoach operator would offer a fare reduction in return for being the favoured connection at the Edinburgh end. The Union Canal had provided considerable financial support to the Slamannan company in its early days and it was now being squeezed out. Reliability of the westbound canal trip seems to have been poor, and on 5 November 1841, the Slamannan board decided that the westbound train would leave at the advertised time whether or not the connecting boat had arrived. As this made the boat-and-railway journey practically impossible, the G&GR stopped selling through tickets for that journey, and the poor Union Canal had to try to reinvigorate its intercity business over the Forth and Clyde Canal instead.
Nonetheless the railway transit was also under threat, and a fare reduction in December 1841 did little to stave off the approaching doom: on 21 February 1842 the Edinburgh and Glasgow Railway opened its railway (to Haymarket). As a relatively modern, fast and direct line, it put an end to the Slamannan's through passenger service.
Mineral and goods By contrast the mineral traffic was disappointing at the beginning; of course it relied on as-yet unproven pits in the area being developed. Moreover, all the trade to Edinburgh involved a transshipment to the canal at Causewayend. There was practically no goods (non-mineral) traffic. Thus in 1841 mineral receipts were £1,271 (from 26,776 tons) compared with £6,174 from passengers. The mineral tonnage climbed steadily, rising to 74,130 tons in 1845, still woefully weak.
Locomotives At first the company operated two locomotives on passenger duties; it seems that until March 1842 one of them worked exclusively below the Ballochney's inclines, to and from Townhead. In this period there was one goods engine operating, although the sparse traffic levels led to only one engine at a time being required for duty from 1842.
The locomotive stock included Borealis from the Rowan Company and two Fairbairn locomotives, Thistle and Rose.
After the opening of the Edinburgh and Glasgow Railway The Slamannan Railway had been built with high hopes of revolutionising transport between Glasgow and Edinburgh, as well as gaining access to rich new mineral fields. It was disappointed in both respects, and the opening of the Edinburgh and Glasgow Railway (E&GR) in 1842 seemed to be a hammer blow to the Slamannan company, with their primitive sleeper block railway and a suddenly out-of-date track gauge.David Turnock, The Historical Geography of Scotland Since 1707, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1982, Although the line gave access for the first time to isolated moorland communities, the traffic brought little money in.John Thomas revised J S Paterson, A Regional History of the Railways of Great Britain: Volume 6, Scotland, the Lowlands and the Borders, David and Charles, Newton Abbot, 1984,
In the best ways of management, the directors saw this as an opportunity: if they could connect to the E&GR with its more efficient connections to Edinburgh and elsewhere, they could enhance the traffic they carried. At Causewayend they were close to the E&GR and a connecting line there was the solution.
Slamannan Junction Railway