Shale Trail revives memories of West Lothian oil lines
MEMORIES of West Lothian’s once-extensive standard and 2ft 6in gauge railways – which served the area’s shale oil industry for close on 100 years – are being revived thanks to the new 16 mile Shale Trail, linking Livingston and West Calder.
The shale oil industry, founded by Glasgow chemist James ‘Paraffin’ Young in the 1860s, employed 40,000 miners, oil and railway staff during its heyday, which lasted until just after First World War, when cheaper crude oil from the Middle East hit the industry hard. The last oil works closed in 1963.
The £310,000 Heritage Lottery Fund-backed trail, which opens this year, has been built by Edinburgh and Lothians Greenspace Trust and includes sections of former railway lines and highlights the surviving ‘bings’ – the enormous slag heaps still visible throughout the area.
Relics in the spotlight
Project officer Heath Brown said: “We will have information boards along the path with online resources specific to each location, for phone and tablet. The Five Sisters Bing at West Calder, for example, arose during shale’s Second World War upsurge.
“It’s the work of 2ft 6in gauge locomotives, pushing trucks, full of hot slag from heating shale rock to release the oil, up the bing gradient, for dumping. Without railways, the bings would not be here as obvious relics of the industry.”
Heath says the trail will also turn the spotlight on the Museum of the Scottish Shale Oil Industry, based at Livingston’s Almond Valley Heritage Centre, which houses one of the first electric railway locomotives in the UK. Niddry Oil Works No. 2 was built by Baldwin in the USA in 1902, and ran on the plant’s 2ft 6in gauge, overhead-powered railway until closure in 1961. A Scottish Oil Agency standard gauge 12 ton tank wagon, which carried shale oil, has been fully restored and is also on show.
Museum director Dr Robin Chesters said: “Without railways, there would have been no shale oil. Railways at home and abroad used shale oil paraffin for lamps and fuel, so the connection is strong.
Heritage operations
“We operate our Almond Valley Light Railway (AVLR) as a working reminder of the 2ft 6in gauge lines serving the shale oil industry. With the Shale Trail starting here, we hope to attract many more visitors to the museum and to the AVLR, to discover the fascinating history of the time when West Lothian shale oil met 2% of world oil needs, and, when the industry was well-served by its railways.”
Private owner shale oil wagons, such as those from the Pumpherston Oil Company, were a common sight on national railways up until the Grouping of 1923 while, with the later ownership of the shale oil industry falling to BP, their tank wagons also operated from oil works in West Lothian, over now-closed lines connecting to area’s surviving main lines. The trail will point out some of these lines.
Heath Brown said: “The Shale Trail will open later this year and be a tremendous attraction for anyone interested in railway heritage and associated industrial archaeology.”