Slamannan Railway

The Slamannan Railway was an early mineral railway between the north-eastern margin of Airdrie and Causewayend on the Union Canal, near Linlithgow, Scotland.

The Slamannan Railway was built to give access for minerals from pits in the Slamannan area to market in Glasgow (over connecting railways) and Edinburgh (over the Union Canal), and it also briefly provided an early passenger connection between Glasgow and Edinburgh in association with other railways and the canal. It had a rope-worked incline at Causewayend.

The line opened on 31 August 1840. It crossed very thinly populated moorland, and it was dependent on promised mineral extraction on its own route, but this proved disappointing, and traffic was limited by the extended route over other railways westward, and transshipment to the canal eastward. It was never successful commercially, and in 1848 it combined with other companies, forming the Monkland Railways.

None of the route is still in use, and much of it near Airdrie has been obliterated by modern open-cast mineral extraction.

In the first decades of the nineteenth century, there was a considerable increase in coal and iron ore extraction, and of iron smelting, in the general area of Coatbridge and Airdrie, and improvements in the efficiency of the process of iron manufacture led to accelerating demand for coal and iron ore, which in turn emphasised the weakness of the means of transport of the heavy materials. In 1771 the Monkland Canal had opened between the Airdrie pits and Glasgow, and it was followed by the Forth and Clyde Canal in 1790. In 1826 the Monkland and Kirkintilloch Railway (M&KR) was opened, conveying the minerals to the canal at Kirkintilloch for onward transport to Glasgow and Edinburgh.

In 1828 the Ballochney Railway gave access from pits north and east of Airdrie to the M&KR and thence onward to the canal; and in 1831 the Garnkirk and Glasgow Railway was opened, giving a more direct rail connection to Glasgow, but terminating at Townhead canal wharf there. In 1831-2 the Edinburgh and Dalkeith Railway opened, giving access from pits in the Eskbank and Dalhousie areas to Edinburgh and Leith.

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