URGENT BO’NESS LANDSLIP DAMAGE APPEAL EXCEEDS £100,000 TARGET
A£100,000 appeal to repair major landslip damage at the Bo’ness & Kinneil Railway exceeded its target in just over two weeks.
The Scottish Railway Preservation Society launched the appeal after heavy rain on August 11/12 caused five slips in the line’s trackbed, the worst being approximately half a mile from Birkhill station in the Bo’ness direction, and the other four between it and Birkhill.
The appeal raised a total of £118,250, of which £1,300 came from a sponsored five-mile run around Linlithgow Loch by fiveyear-old Cameron Wills (both figures including Gift Aid).
“We’ve never seen anything like it,” commented SRPS director Andrew Fowler of the appeal’s success.
Steve Humphreys, the society’s chairman, said: “It is heart-warming to receive such generosity from people of all ages who want the railway to reopen just as much as we do. We really want to be able celebrate next year, the 60th anniversary of our foundation at Murrayfield station in 1961, with trains running once again.”
As this issue went to press, the SRPS was expecting to receive designs imminently for the repairs from a consultant geotechnical engineer, after which it can issue tenders for the work to potential contractors.
An estimate of the timescale for the repairs can then be made, said Mr Fowler; the line had been about to start ‘refresher’ workings for crews, in preparation for the resumption of public services, when the damage occurred.
The same rainstorm appears to have caused the landslip that derailed a Scotrail High Speed Train near Stonehaven on the morning of August 12, with the deaths of the driver, conductor and one passenger.