Wemyss and Buckhaven Railway

The Wemyss and Buckhaven Railway was a railway company that built a line in the county of Fife in Scotland, connecting Buckhaven with the main line railway network at Thornton, and linking with collieries.

It was financed privately by the Wemyss Estate and largely built on Wemyss Estate land, and it opened in 1881.

It was extended to harbours at Methil and Leven in 1884 to give collieries better access to export shipping; the extension line was called the Leven Extension Railway, and was also privately financed. A passenger service was operated between Thornton and Methil.

The line was sold to the North British Railway in 1889.

The railway served the rich mineral resources of the East Fife Coalfield, but that declined after 1930, and passenger carryings fell steeply at the same time. The line was closed to passenger traffic in 1955 and to all except a very limited goods and mineral traffic in 1965. It closed completely in 1980 and there is now no railway activity on the former line.

As part of the frenzy of railway speculation culminating in 1845, the Edinburgh and Northern Railway was authorised in 1845 to build from Burntisland to Perth and Dundee, forming a through communication between Edinburgh and Dundee with ferry crossings of the Firth of Forth and the Firth of Tay. The company changed its name to the Edinburgh, Perth and Dundee Railway (EP&DR), and opened its main line in the years 1847 to 1848, running broadly south to north through Thornton.

Leven was an important manufacturing town and port at the time, and the independently promoted Leven Railway opened in 1854, joining the town with a junction with the EP&DR at Thornton. The Leven Railway did not connect to the harbour at Leven, and its objective was eventually to extend eastwards to serve the fishing communities on the Fife coast. In fact another independent company, the East of Fife Railway, extended from Leven to Kilconquhar; the two companies merged, forming the Leven and East of Fife Railway and extending to Anstruther.

Extensive lands in East Fife were in the ownership of the Wemyss family, and in 1854 James Hay Erskine Wemyss succeeded to the lairdship. Coal had long been extracted on the Wemyss Estate by tenants, and James Wemyss wished to encourage the activity. It was held back by difficult transport conditions; the priority of the Leven Railway and its extensions was not to connect with the pits, and the coastwise and export shipping routes were constrained by the limited harbour facilities on the coast. It was not until 1868 that the Leven and East of Fife Railway constructed a branch line to Muiredge, connecting a pit there, and even so there was no railway route to a useful harbour in East Fife, and much of the export traffic went to Burntisland; this was a long and expensive rail transit. The North British Railway (NBR) took over the EP&DR in 1862 and effectively controlled railway transit in the area.

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