Nostalgia: Tracking the changes on city railway

Published on Saturday 27 June 2009 11:10

IT LOOKS rather like the scene from a wartime movie – jittery horses being steadied by military men in uniform as they prepare to board a train headed for some terrifying frontline.

In fact, this is Corstorphine in 1966 and the Royal Horse Artillery are preparing for the far more enjoyable task of attending the Royal Highland Show.

They have alighted at Corstorphine Station, the terminus of a line branch which was opened back in 1902. For a while the area south of the parish church in the village was known as "Irish corner", as the gangs which built the track were housed there.

It was nearly the end of the line for this branch when the Royal Horse Artillery were snapped by the Evening News – it closed the following year, on 30 December.

It also meant the end for the last station on the line before the terminus – Pinkhill, with its notice "Alight here for the Zoological Park". Eighteen trains a day each way passed through the zoo stop and on to Corstorphine when the line closed, victim of the swathe of rail cuts in the 1960s.

Another such loss was Portobello – all that remains of the original station is the station master's house. But the Porty stop might be about to make a reappearance. Proposals have this week been put forward by campaigners to reopen the station.

Supporters of the plan say it would dramatically cut the journey times for commuters getting in and out of the city centre.

It's a huge turnabout in thinking from 40 years ago when the Beeching Report of 1963 led to numerous closures.

Another Beeching victim was Princes Street station, known as the Caledonian or Caley station. The ornate station was attached to the hotel of the same name at the other end of the famous thoroughfare from the North British's Waverley and its hotel, now the Balmoral. Once more than 60 suburban services departed from the Caley station each day, but the station was closed in 1965.

The railway arrived in Penicuik in 1872 and departed in 1967, although the passenger service had gone by 1951.

Once Morningside was just one of the stops on the Edinburgh Suburban and South Side Junction Railway, or South Sub, along with Gorgie, Craiglockhart, Newington and Duddingston, but it too shut to passengers in the 1960s.

Last year, a bid was made to reopen that line, but it hit the buffers – perhaps the Porty plans will have more luck.