Riccarton Junction railway station

Riccarton Junction
Riccarton Junction railway station in 2007.
Location
Area	Roxburghshire
Coordinates	55°16′17″N 2°43′36″W / 55.2715°N 2.7267°W / 55.2715; -2.7267Coordinates: 55°16′17″N 2°43′36″W / 55.2715°N 2.7267°W / 55.2715; -2.7267
Grid reference	NY539977
Operations
Original company	Border Union Railway - The Waverley Route
Pre-grouping	North British Railway
Post-grouping	London and North Eastern Railway
Platforms	3 (later 2)
History
2 July 1862	Opened as Riccarton NB
1 January 1905	Renamed Riccarton Junction
6 January 1969	Closed
Disused railway stations in the United Kingdom
Closed railway stations in Britain A B C D–F G H–J K–L M–O P–R S T–V W–Z

Riccarton Junction, in the county of Roxburghshire in the Scottish Borders, was a railway village and station. In its heyday it had 118 residents and its own school, post office and grocery store. The station was an interchange between the Border Counties Railway branch to Hexham and the North British Railway's (NBR's) Border Union Railway (also known as the Waverley Route).

The settlement of Riccarton, which adjoins the station, consisted, in 1959, of around thirty houses, with at least one member of each household working for British Railways, which had a civil engineer's depot near the station. Remarkably there was no road access until a forest track was built in 1963, all access until then being by rail. The isolated position of Riccarton and the need to provide for the villagers may have been one reason why the station remained open until the late 1960s, as by this time ordinary public traffic was virtually non-existent. The branch line from Riccarton Junction to Kielder and Hexham was closed 15 October 1956. The Waverley Route was closed on 6 January 1969.

Track panels were re-laid by the now wound-up Friends of Riccarton Junction, but these were later lifted in 2011.

The Waverley Route Heritage Association have since reconstructed a section of track between Whitrope Siding and Tunnel as a heritage railway; this is not connected to the site at Riccarton itself. The association, having secured a three-year lease on the two-mile section to the site, are aiming to restore this section of the former route from its base at Whitrope down the line into the Junction as the southern terminus of the preserved line.

Ian Nairn visited the station three years after its closing in his 1972 programme Nairn Across Britain: From Leeds into Scotland. By this date the tracks through the station had been lifted.