Newtyle railway paths

Virtually all my blog posts are written a short while after the event. I do occasionally piece together a report from memory, aided by Facebook images and comments from the relevant date. This week, I physically revisited a walk I'd undertaken a few years previously. Nicole was travelling up to Dundee for her part-time university course and I dropped her off before taking the car a few miles further north into Angus. The village of Newtyle is ringed by the Sidlaw Hills and the settlement grew around the terminus of Scotland's first commercial railway, which explains the regular grid plan of the main streets.

The Dundee & Newtyle Railway opened in 1831 and was rather Heath Robinson in its original form. The gradients were too steep in places for conventional traction and three rope-hauled inclines powered by stationary steam engines were implemented. This included a tunnel below Dundee Law. The relatively flat sections were serviced initially by horse power and later upgraded to locomotive working. The convoluted scheme proved tedious and maintenance costs were high. The original intention of the railway was to facilitate the movement of agricultural and jute products but passenger traffic was also buoyant. In 1860, work began on by-passing the inclines and three sweeping deviations were constructed. Continuous trains commenced operation in 1868 and this arrangement continued for almost a century until the final goods service ran in 1967. Like many rural routes across the land, the Dundee & Newtyle Railway had struggled to compete with the rapid post-war rise of road transport. Passenger trains had ceased 12 years earlier. Some remaining infrastructure around Newtyle has been converted to walking paths and it was this little network I planned to investigate. As it turned out, I would also discover other fascinating artefacts slightly off piste. Anyone wishing to explore the local area should call in at the village shop and buy the pack of slim booklets detailing the various trails. The railway path begins at the public park but I followed the advice in the leaflet to walk 200 yards along Commercial Street to check out the original railway terminus and extant engine shed (pictured above). The stone building was shuttered but otherwise looked to be in reasonable condition. The alignment of the 1-in-13 Hatton incline down to the village could be picked out and I was able to examine the remains of the passenger platform. The rebuilding of the line included a new station on the north side of the village but the train shed remained in use and a link was left in place. Things had changed on my second visit, with the old buildings now in the process of being converted to residential apartments. It will safeguard the future of what must be some of Scotland's oldest railway real estate. What a cool place to live!

I headed back to the park and proceeded along the signed path. The initial stretch was the beginning of an early two-pronged extension to the original railway which connected Newtyle to Coupar Angus and Glamis. Neither of these routes proved particularly successful but they found a new lease of life after being subsumed by an express line. More of that soon. I noted the outline of a railway turntable around the point where the northern extension would have merged with the realigned approach to Newtyle. The modernisation project included a branch to Alyth which closed to passengers and goods in 1951 and 1965 respectively. I enjoyed fine views of Kinpurney Hill as I strolled along the embankment. A square tower stands upon the summit and was erected in 1774 as an observatory. I climbed up here following my first exploration of the Newtyle railway network and enjoyed the panorama of Angus and Perthshire blurring together and also the distant Grampian Mountains. I curved round to meet the B954 where the bridge was missing. This was the point where the Alyth line diverged. The path continued for another 800 yards upon an embankment between the fields before descending to meet a minor road where another bridge was long gone. The signed railway route ends here but it's possible to continue another mile and a half towards the tiny village of Ardler along the trackbed of the Scottish Midland Junction Railway - which blazed a trail between Perth and Forfar, before continuing onwards to Aberdeen via Kinnaber Junction, north of Montrose. This inland main line emerged in the mid-1840s during a frenzy of railway building and the handful of companies involved were absorbed into the Caledonian Railway conglomeration by 1866. The high-speed artery competed favourably with the coastal connection to Aberdeen, nowadays known as the East Coast Main Line. The original extensions to the Newtyle Railway sat on the perfect axis for this new scheme and were duly taken over. The path I had just completed merged with the main line just beyond the point where I now stood. I didn't have time to continue to Ardler today as I intended to back-track along the partially overgrown Caledonian line and also explore the roundabout approach to Newtyle from Dundee that avoided the fearsome Hatton incline.

A rough path snaked along the Caledonian trackbed back to the point where the railway passed underneath the B954. This is also the sight of Alyth Junction Station, which closed in 1967 along with the entire main route, although freight was retained between Perth and Forfar until 1982. Ultimately only one corridor to Aberdeen could survive the Beeching axe of the 1960s and it wasn't to be the Caledonian option. A tragedy really, as the tracks didn't remotely duplicate the coastal run, apart from the final shared stretch to the Granite City. I wandered alongside the ghostly platforms and tried to picture steam expresses thundering through this quiet rural spot. The Alyth branch passed over the Caledonian territory and the bridge supports are still in place. Such a sight is common enough when exploring dismantled routes. Much rarer is the presence of lineside telegraphy infrastructure. The odd rotting wooden pole can be spotted here and there but today I encountered a complete specimen with hanging wires and insulator pots pretty much intact. I've yet to see a better "in the wild" example of this anywhere else. If you look at old railway photographs, you'll notice most routes had wires strung alongside the tracks. This wasn't just for signalling purposes. The railways provided convenient corridors for linking up towns with the new telecoms technology. Eventually it all went underground, although you still sometimes see telegraph poles following unclassified roads, and certain villages have retained the heritage aspect of wires criss-crossing the main street. But no modern railways are flanked by telegraph poles. The Victorians could never have imagined that one day this wired network wouldn't just convey human voices, but all manner of complex data as the embryonic internet took shape.

An even more surprising piece of equipment stood near the old flyover. A tall semaphore signal reached up through the surrounding foliage to a considerable height. Normally these metal towers were removed for scrap and it's anyone's guess why this example was left in situ. The bolted-on ladder ran all the way to the top and it felt remarkably solid. I only climbed a few rungs as far as the (now rotting) wooden platform that must have been used for maintenance inspections. Had I gone higher I could probably have re-enacted the Castlemaine XXXX lager advert from the late 80s - I can see the pub from here! It would almost have been a true statement as the Belmont Arms is situated next to the old Alyth Junction station, but sadly a victim of Covid closures. I retraced my steps to the end of the official railway path and it's worth noting that a major accident occurred here in 1948 at the point where the two lines spliced together, which happens to lie along the Angus Perthshire boundary. A local train from Newtyle collided with a Royal Mail express bound for London Euston. The engine of the latter was separated from the tender and ended up on its side in a field, demolishing a bridge parapet in the process. The running speed on the main line was 90mph and two crew members were killed - the driver of the local service and the fireman on the high-speed train. Eight passengers plus the two remaining footplate staff were taken to Dundee Infirmary. The tragedy could easily have been far worse as an excursion train was steaming towards the crash site and the presence of lineside tar boilers was obscuring visibility. Fortunately the driver noticed a danger signal at the last moment and slammed on the anchors, bringing his train to a stop just five feet short of the wreckage strewn across the tracks. An additional hazard was the throng of uninjured passengers from the local train milling about trackside, many in a state of shock. I continued to the hamlet of Newbigging and hooked up with a right of way, known as Water Backie Path. This allowed me to rejoin the course of the Newtyle Railway.

The final part of my planned walk was an exploration of the curving deviation constructed in the 1860s to avoid the sharp Hatton incline. The path runs through an atmospheric moss-lined rock cutting known locally as the Gullet. The sunken strip must surely be a haven for rare plant life and the gradient was very noticeable as I tramped uphill. The locomotives would have required a good head of steam to negotiate this loop. I passed a couple of obvious side paths leading back to the village centre and pressed on until I reached an area of woodland that had suffered heavy storm damage. An old quarry lay beyond and the going became increasingly muddy. I therefore decided to turn back and I varied my route by cutting through a field in order to check out Hatton Castle on the edge of Newtyle. It occupies slope facing towards the foot of Hatton Hill, with good views across Strathmore. There is a strategic reason for a fortification here as the castle guards the northern end of a pass through the Sidlaw Hills. The tower house was built in 1575 on a Z-plan, which comprises a strong central rectangular section with smaller towers attached at diagonally opposite corners. The building was forfeited and de-roofed in 1720 following the Jacobite rebellion and fell into ruin, the new estate owners choosing to build a mansion elsewhere. Restoration work was undertaken in the 1980s and the castle is now a private family home. The Great Hall has stunning acoustics and several memorable dances and concerts have been held. It is a regular gathering place for Scottish traditional musicians, notably hosting the creative network Fiddle Force.

I wandered back into the centre of the village and called in at renowned butcher James Pirie & Son for a well-earned snack. Established in 1960, the shop has won multiple industry awards over the years, including a trio of victories in the World Scotch Pie Championship. James worked into his late 80s and became Britain's oldest butcher. The business is now in the hands of his son Alan and I couldn't pass up the opportunity to sample some of the wares. A couple of individual steak pies went down a treat and restored my energy levels. I drove back to Dundee to collect Nicole and wondered about that old tunnel under the Law (never Law Hill, by the way). The 360-yard bore opened for business in 1831 but was superseded by a deviation via Lochee. Mushrooms were grown within the dark interior for a few years but the tunnel fell out of use, being brought back into service as an air-raid shelter during WW2. After many decades of exploration by intrepid local youngsters, the ends of the tunnel were sealed in 1981 as development work took place around the old portals. The subterranean passage however remains intact and receives an internal inspection every three years. One lucky householder has an access hatch in the back garden. There have been campaigns to open the tunnel as a public attraction. We live in hope.