Kilmarnock to Troon Railway

Something quite extraordinary was happening in Kilmarnock in the early years of the 19th Century. It was an engineering project on, for the time, a massive scale. Between 1808 and 1812 a railway was constructed to take coal and minerals from Kilmarnock to the harbour at Troon. It was also used to carry passengers, from June 27, 1812. There had been short pit railways before and a few wagon ways, but nothing as ambitious as the Kilmarnock and Troon Railway. It was a bold and imaginative step.

It was the first railway in Scotland for which an Act of Parliament was required. This was because the line crossed lands that were owned by various people. The railway came about because when William Henry Cavendish Bentinck, Marquis of Titchfield, the son and heir of the third Duke of Portland, married Henrietta, the daughter of Major General John Scott of Fife, he acquired, through her, lands around Kilmarnock which were rich in coal. Although he did what he could to develop his estates, the transport of coal to the coast was a major problem. The roads were either dusty tracks or muddy pathways, depending on the weather. At the time, the logical alternative to using the bad roads was to build a canal. A two mile canal had been built at Saltcoats and the idea for a Kilmarnock Canal gained ground. The plan was to build it from the River Irvine near Glencairn Square to the new harbour then being built at Troon for the  Duke of Portland, before it was abandoned in favour of the more ambitious idea of a railway. 

The required act of Parliament was passed in May 1808, and work started soon after. The cost was estimated at £38,000. The horse drawn railway (or plateway which would be more technically correct), was built to standards quite different from those today. The gauge was four feet while today it is four feet eight and a half inches. Two tracks were laid and there were frequent places where one vehicle could pull across to the other track to allow a faster horse to pass. The metal rails, most of which were made either at Glenbuck or at the Kilmarnock Foundry, were three feet long weighed 40 pounds each. They were not laid on wooden sleepers, instead they were placed on stone blocks, 9-12 inches thick. The ground on which the stone blocks were laid was beaten solid. The railway was not easy to build, it crossed soft ground at Shewalton and a bridge had to be built over the River Irvine not far from Gatehead. This four arched stone bridge (the Laigh Milton Viaduct), although no longer used, is now thought to be the world's oldest railway viaduct. In 1812 the railway was open for business and although it was intended to be used only for coal and minerals, a passenger service was started on June 27, 1812, just before the line was completed. It was one of the first regular railway passenger services in the world. 

A few years after the line was opened it was the scene of the first test in Scotland of a steam locomotive which put the Kilmarnock and Troon railway at the very forefront of the railway revolution. Very little is known about the engine itself. It was bought by the Duke of Portland for £750 and he named it 'The Duke', after himself and it arrived in  Kilmarnock  sometime between 1816 and 1818. A letter dated March 25, 1813, to the Duke of Portland from William Jessop, the engineer who did much of the work on the railway, relates to the specifications of a steam locomotive which would be needed for use on the line. It is also almost certain that 'The Duke' was built by George Stevenson in 1816. It used patents, just registered by Stephenson and William Losh. It was the first 0-6-0 locomotive to be built anywhere and it was also the first that Stephenson ever built for a customer, all his previous ones being built for the Killingworth Colliery. The engine was said to have been too advanced for the primitive track, thumping on the cast iron plates causing considerable damage and forcing the need for frequent repairs. In 1821, the company considered a complaint from a local farmer whose land bordered the railway. He complained that cinders from the locomotive had caused a fire in his field. It was the first complaint of its kind in Scotland. Eventually the Duke was retired, and around 1838, Scotland's first locomotive was sold for scrap metal.

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