Arbroath and Forfar Railway

The Arbroath and Forfar Railway was a railway that connected Forfar with the port town of Arbroath, in Scotland.

It opened in 1838–1839 and it was successful in making an operating profit, but it was always desperately short of capital. It used the track gauge of 5 ft 6 in (1,676 mm).

When the Aberdeen Railway was authorised in 1845, it leased the Arbroath and Forfar line to form part of its main line connecting Forfar and Aberdeen; it opened in 1848. The Aberdeen Railway was to be a standard gauge line and the A&FR had to alter its track gauge. The A&FR line formed part of the main line from Stirling to Aberdeen, and when the North British Railway started running to Aberdeen in 1881, their trains too ran over a very short section of the A&FR.

Nearly all of the A&FR line was closed in 1967 when the former NBR route was selected as the only route to Aberdeen, and the short section immediately north of Arbroath is the only section of the A&FR still in use.

In the early years of the nineteenth century there was an explosion in the volume of textile production in Forfarshire (also known as Angus) as industrialisation was introduced. The transport of raw materials and lime for agricultural purposes to inland towns, and of the finished products to market, were hampered by the poor transport facilities of the town. In 1817 the magistrates of Arbroath considered the construction of a canal to link Forfar, but the proposal was not adopted. As the need for a transport connection became more pressing, the idea of a railway was proposed, and in 1826 Stevenson and Blackadder surveyed a railway route; they planned an inclined plane to descend into Arbroath; the final approach to the harbour was to have been through the streets. This scheme too did not proceed, but it was revived in 1824, by which time a waggonway was a viable alternative; Robert Stevenson supervised the survey. The route would have involved a rope-worked inclined plane to descend to Arbroath Harbour; it too was not progressed.

In 1835 a number of prominent citizens of Arbroath commissioned a review of possible routes for a railway, examining the waggonway proposal; technology had now proceeded to the point where a railway was the natural transport medium. The Edinburgh firm of railway engineers Grainger and Miller had been commissioned to carry out the review, and they proposed a route rather different to Stevenson's; the Dundee and Newtyle Railway had opened in 1832, and involved street running in Dundee itself. This was now seen as undesirable, and the final access to Arbroath Harbour was changed to be on dedicated land. The estimated cost of construction was £36,871, and the scheme was launched to the public at a meeting of 7 August 1835; £40,000 was subscribed within a month. A local man, William Lindsay Carnegie, was the dynamic force in promoting the railway scheme.

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