Montrose and Bervie Railway

The Montrose and Bervie Railway was a Scottish railway. When the Aberdeen Railway opened in 1850, the coastal settlements north of Montrose were not linked in, and local interests promoted a branch line from Montrose to Bervie. They found it impossible to raise capital at first, but from 1861 the larger railways were promoting new connections around Aberdeen, and the Great North of Scotland Railway (GNoSR) decided that the Bervie line would give it a route to the south.

That scheme did not proceed, but the GNoSR had put money in, and the simple branch line opened, in 1865.

It was absorbed by the North British Railway in 1881, who also thought it might give them a springboard towards Aberdeen; that scheme too failed to materialise, and the line remained a quiet backwater.

Road transport spelt doom for the sparsely trafficked line, and it closed in 1951.

In 1848, the Aberdeen Railway opened its line from Guthrie, between Arbroath and Forfar, to Montrose; a shortage of capital delayed its extension to Aberdeen for a while, but after some difficulty it opened to Ferryhill in 1850. The main line ran inland, however, and Montrose was at the end of a stub branch. The coastal communities further north saw the benefits of a railway connection to other villages, and they pressed the Aberdeen Railway, and its successor the Scottish North Eastern Railway (SNER), to build a branch northwards along the coast.

These approaches were unsuccessful and the larger companies had other priorities. At length the local people promoted their own branch line, and they obtained their authorising Act of Parliament for the Montrose and Bervie Railway on 3 July 1860. The line was to be 12 miles (19 km) long and authorised capital was £70,000.

The Act authorised the capital but the company had to raise the money themselves, and this proved extremely difficult. In fact two years of strenuous attempts to secure subscriptions were almost completely fruitless, and it appeared likely that the scheme would have to be abandoned.

However in 1861 a new main line railway was floated, the Scottish Northern Junction Railway, which would connect Kintore, on the Great North of Scotland Railway (GNoSR) line near Inverurie, with the SNER at Limpet Mill near Stonehaven. It had been a sore point for several years that the GNoSR and the SNER had no through connection at Aberdeen, the GNoSR being content to transfer southwards goods to coastal shipping at Aberdeen; at a stroke a highly useful through line would be created, taking away substantial income from the GNoSR.

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