Rail revival

SIR – I’m afraid Robert Thomas (Letters, July 21) is wrong about the purpose of the “Port Road” – the former railway line from Dumfries to Stranraer.

It was not built to serve the area through which it ran, as he suggests. Not even the most optimistic Victorian would spend the enormous sums involved to provide trains for the few obscure and unremunerative places that were served by the Port Road only as a by-product of its existence.

The line was actually built to provide a through route from Portpatrick (which did not work) and later Stranraer (which did) – not to Scotland but to England, taking the benefit of the “short sea route” to Ireland. It was owned by four companies: the London and North Western Railway (LNWR), which owned the West Coast Main Line; the Midland, which owned its own main lines from Bristol and St Pancras to Carlisle; the Glasgow and South Western, which was the Midland’s partner in getting trains to Glasgow from Carlisle; and the Caledonian, the LNWR’s partner in the Scottish part of the West Coast Main Line.

As a local line, it was always completely uneconomic – but as a strategic through route it was invaluable. Dr Beeching closed it because, by the 1960s, all the railways were under common ownership. British Rail did not need so many ports for Ireland when it had Fishguard, Liverpool, Fleetwood, Heysham and Stranraer. The route from Glasgow was fine for the Scottish traffic but hopeless, capacity-wise, for the English traffic too, which simply went on to the roads.

The reinstatement of the Port Road would be a massive strategic boost to the rail and shipping network of Britain as a whole, and should be high on the list of any such projects undertaken by any central rail authority.

David Pearson Haworth, West Yorkshire