I WAS a child in Galashiels when the idea of closing the Waverley Line was first mooted. The adult world was abuzz, but the Beeching Report which contained the seed of the line’s eventual demise meant nothing to my juvenile crew. To us, the railway wasn’t a vital transport link, but a source of much needed diversion.
At the Torwoodlee Tunnel, for instance, someone would be designated to put an ear to the line and check for approaching trains. On the other side, we guddled trout and golf balls in the Gala Water where it abutted Torwoodlee golf course, or laid coins on the line to admire the various ways that passing trains distorted them. Such was the entertainment available to school children in the Borders in the 1960s.
For the adults, however, the prospective closing of the rail connection to Scotland’s capital was a serious business. My younger brother was a long term in-patient at Princess Margaret Rose Orthopaedic Hospital in Edinburgh where he shared a ward with the child victims of thalidomide. The closure of the railway would mean my parents having to take the interminable bus ride up the A7 to visit him. Instead they learned to drive.
There were other domestic factors at work too, albeit beyond my childish ken. My father was the headmaster of St Margaret’s RC Primary School in Gala and could call on a Cardinal and Lady Patricia Maxwell Scott from Abbotsford for the ceremonial opening of its new building. By contrast, the school’s general population was an irregular collection of slightly alien non-Borderers. Our dress-up days were more First Holy Communion than Braw Lad and Lass and the sport of choice was football rather than rugby (John Collins is the school’s most famous alumnus). Family connections often lay elsewhere – Poland, Ireland or, as in our case, Glasgow. My mother felt the separation from the West of Scotland very keenly and the prospect of the railway closing didn’t help. “It would have been easier to get home,” she said years later “if we’d moved to Spain.”
The Waverley Line reopened as the Borders Railway in 2014 making Gala easily accessible again from Edinburgh and The Return Journey is a celebration of the achievement. Backed by the Borders Railway project, with a foreword by a Scottish Government minister and an introduction by the project director, it could easily have been a routine vanity production. Fortunately, someone with wisdom and imagination decided to base a “photographic journey” around Peter Ross’s human story of the Borders Railway and it’s a felicitous approach to the subject.
Ross has form when it comes to good stories. His previous book Daunderlust: Dispatches from Unreported Scotland explored unsung people and places and discovered remarkable voices where nobody else thought to look. Here his range is restricted by the obligation to connect to the Borders Railway, but his eye for an engaging story is undiminished. The aforementioned project director, for instance, is a man called Hugh Wark who walked the entire route in 2012 in the company of his assistant construction manager Martin “Paddy” Power. Power was previously employed by British Rail to remove infrastructure like station buildings and signal boxes along the Waverley route (“We went vandalising”) and Wark retired after the Borders Railway project was finished (“the closing number of his working life”). They are two of several subjects identified by Ross whose lives have come full circle courtesy of a linear railway line.
Ross embeds with the construction workers; follows the Silver Band in Newtongrange; attends the Melrose Rugby Sevens; chats with Gala’s Braw Lad and Lass; and visits Sir Walter Scott’s Abbotsford house. Everywhere the familiar is glossed by the passage of time. When the Braw Lad says “If you’re not from the Borders, you’ll never understand” it still stings a bit even after all these years. The gate cottage at Abbotsford back in the day was occupied by a Polish family whose daughter attended St Margaret’s. Their care-taking duties, as I remember, were carried out without much fear of interruption by groups of tourists. Presumably they would be busier now. The final set of photographs includes the Queen officially reopening the railway and Union Flags being waved in her honour. There’s more than a hint of misappropriated credit here, but it is all very ’60s and befits the circular theme. The politics of the Borders Railway restoration are beyond the remit of the book, though Ross mentions the grievances of people in Heriot, Fountainhall and Falahill where lives were disrupted by the construction, and records some mutterings from Hawick folk who are still adrift. The other anti-arguments (“better no railway than one that only goes to Gala” etc) seem already forgotten, even by those who made them.
Borders Railway: The Return Journey by Peter Ross; Lily Publications £18.50
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