Rail services cancelled after fire at Troon station destroys platform
Scotrail advised customers not to travel by train to Ayr yesterday following a serious fire at Troon station.
There will be no services from Glasgow Central to Ayr past Kilwinning until at least today. The fire service was called to the blaze in Barassie Street – in the ticket office – around lunchtime on Saturday. It took several hours to bring the fire under control. No-one was injured.
Scotrail, the Fire Commander and British Transport Police closed the line immediately, and services between Glasgow Central and Ayr were suspended.
Much of the building on platform one has been destroyed and an overhead power cable damaged. The cause of the fire is unknown.
Emergency services were still at the scene on Saturday night and a cordon has been set up around the building.
Yesterday, a restoration groupoffered£500,000tohelp repair the building, according to reports on the BBC.
The Railway Heritage Trust said it wanted to help salvage the Victorian structure, which opened in 1892 and was designed by architect James Miller, whose work includes other west coast stations as well as Glasgow Royal Infirmary.
A nearby hairdressing salon and café are understood to also have been damaged.
The trust’s director Andy Savage described the fire as "a real devastation". "Half a million pounds is going to contribute - it's not going to pay the whole bill or anything like
it," he told the BBC.
"Whether it's totally destroyed is another matter, because clearly the timber building is totally destroyed. The key thing with this is whether the iron and steel structure that supports and forms the roof between the two platforms has survived and is salvageable because if that is salvageable then there are options.”
Scotrail organised replacement bus services from Ayr,
Largs, Kilmarnock and Troon stations to transport people who had already completed the outward leg of their journey before the fire broke out, back to Kilwinning station.
From there they were able to transfer to a shuttle train service to Glasgow Central. Several hundred passengers were affected.
Scotrail is working on an appropriate contingency timetable that will see services terminate at, and start back
from, Kilwinning.
It is likely there will be two services an hour between Glasgow and the Ayrshire town.
The Glasgow-largs/ardrossan services are running.
Scotrail is also advising customers to closely monitor its Twitter feed for the most upto-date information on the running of services over the next few days.
In May 2015 the Old Railway Station in Ballater, Royal Deeside,
was destroyed by fire.
Mr Savage said it cost £4.5m and six years to restore Ballater train station, and added: "I'm sure Troon will be more expensive than that, simply because it's next to an operational railway .... so the complexities are far more. But it depends on the damage and what has to be done. It could be relatively easy; it could be much more complex.”