Fife Circle

Fife Circle
Train approaching Dalmeny from the Forth Bridge
Overview
System	National Rail
Locale	Edinburgh Fife Scotland
Operation
Owner	Network Rail
Operator(s)	Abellio ScotRail
Technical
Track gauge	4 ft 8 1⁄2 in (1,435 mm)

The Fife Circle is the local rail service north from Edinburgh. It links towns of south Fife and the coastal towns along the Firth of Forth before heading to Edinburgh. Operationally, the service is not strictly a circle route, but, rather, a point to point service that reverses at the Edinburgh end, and has a large bi-directional balloon loop at the Fife end.

The service includes the Edinburgh-Dunfermline stretch of the East Coast Main Line, which includes the world-famous Forth Bridge. On the Fife side, while this line hugs the coast, the circle is formed by a line from Inverkeithing that loops back round to Kirkcaldy by an inland route via Cowdenbeath through the old Fife coalfield. Narrowly speaking, just this line could be called the Fife Circle.

The current service is actually a combination of two previously separate local routes - Edinburgh to Kirkcaldy & Edinburgh to Cowdenbeath & Cardenden. During the 1970s & 80s British Rail only ran a regular daytime service on the Dunfermline line as far as Cowdenbeath; Lochgelly & Cardenden were only served during the weekday business peaks (as can be seen from Table 242 of the UK All Line timetable of that era), whilst the remainder of the route to Thornton Junction was freight-only (having been closed to passengers in 1969). All local stopping trains on the coast line meanwhile terminated at Kirkcaldy.

In 1989 though, BR decided to link the two services together by reopening the eastern end of the old Edinburgh and Northern Railway Dunfermline branch to passenger traffic and run an 'out & back' service from Edinburgh from the start of the summer timetable in May that year. Three years later (May 1992), a new station was opened at Glenrothes with Thornton at the northern end of the route to serve the town of Glenrothes and restore a rail service to Thornton after an absence of 23 years. This is listed in the timetables as the northern terminal of the Fife Circle and is the point at which certain trains terminate - the rest continue back to Edinburgh along the opposite side of the 'circle'.