The Forgotten Alloa Waggonway: Discover Scotland’s Remarkable Early Coal Railway
Sometimes the best discoveries happen when you are not looking for them. A quick Google search for a wee walk in Alloa led to something far more interesting. The Forgotten Alloa Waggonway: Discover Scotland’s Remarkable Early Coal Railway, hidden beneath the town. I got the surprise of my life.
The remains of the historic Alloa Waggonway and one of Scotland’s earliest railway tunnels.
Some navigation with Google Maps and I found the bright red plaque. What looked like an ordinary path wasn’t! The red plaque marks something called the Alloa Waggonway. I had stumbled onto one of Scotland’s earliest railways.
Finding the Wagonway
To begin with, I headed to 72 Drysdale St, Alloa FK10 1JA, which led me to the small entrance down onto the old waggonway.
Fun fact:
That quiet tunnel beneath Bedford Place may actually be the earliest surviving railway tunnel in Scotland. Not bad for something you can easily walk past without noticing.
A railway before steam engines
The Alloa Waggonway was built around 1768 by John Erskine, 7th Earl of Mar. It was designed to move coal from the pits around Sauchie down to Alloa Harbour on the Firth of Forth.
Coal was already a huge industry in the area, and Edinburgh was a major market. Shipping the coal along the Forth was easy enough. The real problem was getting it from the inland mines down to the harbour.
The solution was a waggonway. An early form of railway where wagons ran along wooden rails and were pulled by horses.
Each wagon could carry around 30 hundredweight of coal (about 1.5 tonnes). Typically three wagons were linked together, allowing a single horse to haul around four and a half tonnes at once.
For the eighteenth century, this was an impressive feat of engineering.
A growing industrial network
The original line ran about 2½ miles (4 kilometres) and connected the coal pits above Alloa with the harbour and nearby industries including the Alloa Glassworks.
Over time the system expanded. The owners added branches to pits at Collyland and Sherriffyards Colliery near Gartmorn Dam, and by 1806 they had extended the line as far as Tillicoultry.
By the nineteenth century the waggonway had become part of a much larger network linking mines, factories and shipping routes.
Rails, Horses and Coal –How the Waggonway Worked
The track itself was surprisingly narrow by modern railway standards. The Alloa Waggonway used a gauge of just 3 feet 3 inches (99 cm). Workers laid timber rails on sleepers and fixed malleable iron bars to the top to protect the rails from the wagon wheels. The wagons themselves ran on cast iron wheels about 27½ inches in diameter. Coal was carried in wagons holding around 30 hundredweight (about 1.5 tonnes), and typically three wagons were linked together with chains. Because the line followed a gentle gradient, a single horse could pull the three loaded wagons – roughly four and a half tonnes of coal – down towards Alloa Harbour, and then haul the empty wagons back up to the mines with relative ease.
Walking through railway history
Today the route of the old waggonway survives as a quiet walking and cycling path through the town.
What I had to explore were the tunnel like bridges along the route. As Alloa expanded in the early nineteenth century, new roads were built over the railway. Rather than altering the track, engineers simply built bridges above it.
One of these tunnels, beneath Bedford Place, is thought to be the earliest railway tunnel in Scotland.
Standing there today, with leaves scattered across the path and the sound of traffic somewhere above, it is hard to imagine coal wagons once rumbling beneath the town.
Coal for the world
At its peak the coal industry around Alloa was exporting huge quantities of fuel.
Records from 1879 show that nearly 160,000 tons of coal were shipped overseas from Alloa, with a further 15,000 tons sent to ports around Britain.
Much of that coal would have travelled part of its journey along the Alloa Waggonway.
The end of the line
The opening of the Tillicoultry Branch of the Stirling and Dunfermline Railway in 1851 gradually made the old horse drawn system obsolete.
Even so, parts of the waggonway continued to operate until 1924.
Today the former railway line forms part of National Cycle Network Route 767, and the path continues north past Gartmorn Dam.
A hidden piece of Scotland’s industrial story
Without the other google posts and the bright red plaque from the National Transport Trust, I would probably have walked straight past without realising what lay beneath my feet.
What looks like a quiet urban path turns out to be a route that once carried coal wagons powering Scotland’s industrial revolution.
Sometimes all it takes is a wee wander to stumble across a remarkable piece of history.
The Forgotten Alloa Waggonway: Discover Scotland’s Remarkable Early Coal Railway
Bonkle House, The Perchy, And The Forgotten Landscape Of Lanarkshire