Date: 09/07/2016

It has no buffet car, the waiting room is a garden shed and only one of its three hand-built carriages is fully glazed. But for one week only, the train from Leadhills to Glengonnar Halt has become an essential addition to the UKs rail network. In a rare, perhaps unique, moment in British railway history, a replacement train service has been put on to make up for a closed road. It is normally the other way round. And this service is run by amateurs.

External links

All aboard! Volunteer rail service makes Scottish railway history

Guardian

A closed road between two remote South Lanarkshire villages meant the weekends-only L&WR railway had to step in

Related images

Looking over Glengonnar station on the Leadhills and Wanlockhead Railway on 26 July 2014.
Location: Glengonnar
Company: Leadhills and Wanlockhead Branch (Caledonian Railway)
27/07/2014 John Yellowlees

Scene at Leadhills on a wet June day in 2006. The former Wanlockhead and Leadhills Light Railway, closed in 1939, reopened as a 2ft gauge private railway in 1988.
Location: Leadhills
Company: Leadhills and Wanlockhead Branch (Caledonian Railway)
04/06/2006 Colin Miller

Leadhills station on the Lowther Railway is built on the site of the former station on the Wanlockhead branch. Visiting O&K 0-4-0T Montalban waits to take a train up the hill in July 1994. A supply of coal is available on the platform to resupply the small bunker on the loco.
Location: Leadhills
Company: Leadhills and Wanlockhead Branch (Caledonian Railway)
/07/1994 John McIntyre