Coupar Angus railway station

The Scottish Midland Junction Railway was authorised in 1845 to build a line from Perth to Forfar. Other companies obtained authorisation in the same year, and together they formed a route from central Scotland to Aberdeen. The SMJR opened its main line on 4 August 1848. Proposals to merge with other railways were rejected by Parliament at first, but in 1856 the SMJR merged with the Aberdeen Railway to form the Scottish North Eastern Railway. The SNER was itself absorbed into the larger Caledonian Railway in 1866. The original SMJR main line was now a small section of a main line from Carlisle and central Scotland to Aberdeen.

The original route was well aligned for fast running, but it by-passed numerous towns and many branches were built to serve them. The rival North British Railway had its own route from the south to Aberdeen, and spectacular competition for the fastest journey from London to Aberdeen was generated in the final decades of the nineteenth century. In the 1960s there were some reflections of those days when powerful steam engines, displaced by diesel locomotives from other routes, operated a fast Glasgow - Aberdeen passenger service for some years.

In the mid 1960s the move to rationalise duplicate routes led to closure of the SMJR main line in 1967 except for a residual goods service to intermediate locations. Now the entire SMJR network has closed, except for the section from Perth to Stanley Junction, serving the main line to Inverness.

From the second decade of the nineteenth century, a number of short railway lines had been operating in Scotland; in most cases these were connected with mineral extraction, and there was little thought to connecting between them to form a network. The and the Liverpool and Manchester Railway in England showed that longer railway routes could be worthwhile, and thoughts turned to trunk railways in Scotland, and to connection to the emerging English network.

In the 1840s business people in Scotland made definite moves which resulted in proposals for trunk lines to connect the central belt of Scotland with England, and in 1845 there was a frenzy of Parliamentary Bills for Scottish railways. The Caledonian Railway was authorised on 12 April 1845 with capital of £1,500,000. Its main line was to run between Edinburgh, Glasgow and Carlisle.

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