Newburgh and North Fife Railway

The Newburgh and North Fife Railway was a Scottish railway company formed to build a connecting line between St Fort and Newburgh, in Fife, intended to open up residential traffic between the intermediate communities and Dundee and Perth.

The short line immediately opened up residential travel from Newport-on-Tay to Dundee, providing a journey time of ten minutes by train, rather than the former unreliable ferry crossing.

Dundee is hemmed in between the Firth of Tay and the hilly country to the north, and expansion to the south, in Fife, encouraged residential development.

[4] Soon the first sod was cut, in June 1906[5] The line involved prodigious engineering works and took five years to construct.

There are three stations, at Kilmanie, Luthrie and Lindores, which have been designed with specially long platforms for the accommodation of the summer excursion traffic.Owing to the nature of the country, no less than 22 steel and nine masonry [viaducts] have been erected, and nearly half a million cubic yards of material were excavated.

There were also intermediate goods sidings at Rathillet, just west of Kilmany, and at Ayton Smithy, between Lindores and Luthrie.

Coming late to the development of transport facilities, there were several important roads to be crossed on the skew, and there were a prodigious number of long-span bridges on the line; earthworks too were of a heavier character than usual.

In addition there was a dispute about the extent of the guarantee to make up the 4% dividend: the issue was the capital sum on which that 4% was to be based.

At a tribunal the NBR presented figures showing that they were losing money heavily in working the line, which was being done for 50% of gross receipts.

[14] The NBR attempted to make something of the line by running fast trains between Dundee and Perth in competition with the Caledonian Railway service.

[9] Moreover, the cut-throat competition of earlier decades was over; in those days the NBR would have used every stratagem to route goods traffic over the line it was working at the expense of its rival; but now fair play was the philosophy, and only goods wagons that achieved a shorter transit travelled over the line.

[16] A photograph of Lindores station is reproduced in David Ross, The North British Railway: A History, Stenlake Publishing Limited, Catrine, 2014, ISBN 978 1 84033 647 4, at page 200.