Newport Railway, Scotland

The Newport Railway was a Scottish railway company, that built a line along the south bank of the Firth of Tay in Fife. The line was opened in 1879, and connected to the Tay Bridge, giving quick access to Dundee; daily residential travel to Dundee from Newport-on-Tay became a practicality.

The use of the bridge gave the railway a massive advantage in passenger and goods transport across the Tay, until the opening of the Tay Road Bridge in 1966. Closure of the railway swiftly followed, and there is no railway use of the route at the present day.

The first railway serving the north-eastern part of Fife was the Edinburgh and Northern Railway, authorised in 1845. Its main lines were built from Burntisland to Perth and to Ferry-Port-on-Craig, and opened in 1849. Ferry-Port-on-Craig was the harbour for the ferry crossing the River Tay to Broughty, and passengers and goods to and from Dundee used the Dundee and Arbroath Railway from Broughty. Ferry-Port-on-Craig station was soon renamed Tay-Port (later Tayport) and the E&NR altered its name to the Edinburgh, Perth and Dundee Railway. The ferry between Tay-Port and Broughty for goods and mineral traffic was adapted to take railway wagons on the vessel; this was a very early instance of roll-on roll-off ferry operation. (Passengers travelled on conventional ferries on the route.)

Tay-Port was little more than a ferry terminal, having been overtaken by the town of Newport-on-Tay, a few miles to the west, which, before the railway, had a more convenient ferry to Dundee. Indeed, the early deliberations of the Edinburgh and Northern Railway included the possibility of taking the route of the railway through Newport, either for a bridge or as a ferry terminal. Newport had a population of 1,326 at the 1861 census.

In 1856 local interests promoted a Tayport and Craighead Railway; it was to run from the Edinburgh, Perth and Dundee Railway station at Tayport, and run to a pier on the River Tay at Craighead, at the north-eastern extremity of Newport.

This scheme, in effect duplicating the EP&DR route to Dundee, came to nothing. In 1862 the EP&DR was absorbed by the growing North British Railway. Local people in Newport saw the benefits that being situated on a railway line offered, and from 1860 there had been gathering momentum behind the construction by the EP&DR and the North British Railway of a Tay Bridge. This would transform the fortunes of North Fife, and more particularly it offered an opportunity to the railway promoters of Newport. A line from Tay-Port to the Fife end of the Tay Bridge would connect into the southward railway network at Tay-Port and towards Dundee at the bridge. A six-mile railway linking the two was what they wanted.

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