It’s become fashionable to blame Dr Richard Beeching for the devastation wrought to Scotland’s railways in the 1960s. His name is inextricably linked with the word “axe” after he published his infamous report which sparked a major series of route closures and cuts across the Highlands and the north east as part of the restructuring of the nationalised system. These included the hammer falling on services from Aberdeen to communities such as Fraserburgh and Peterhead, for which the death knell sounded in 1965.
Yet, a new book by transport expert, David Spaven, has laid bare that it wasn’t Beeching who lost faith in the way trains operated in the region. It was the general public. Use it or lose it – a lesson from a long-lost railway And, while there are calls to revive the Buchan line, the statistics offer a cautionary tale of how more people liked the idea of trains on their doorstep than actually using them.
The Formartine & Buchan Railway originally opened to the Blue Toon in 1862, striking off from the Aberdeen-Inverness line at Dyce, before heading north to Ellon and Maud, where it turned abruptly eastwards. The 16-mile “branch” from Maud to Fraserburgh started operations in 1865 and these were significant links across the area for the next century. Yet they were struggling to cope with increasing car usage and alternative bus services by that stage.
They could have fitted in a taxi In Scotland’s Lost Branch Lines, Mr Spaven has explained how near-empty .