What-if....?

Was the line then suppose just to terminate at Hawick rather than go all the way to Carlisle if I remember correctly? If this had happened, would we now had seen the line getting doubled track/electrified and extending to Carlisle and becoming the third Anglo/Scottish route?

Another interesting scenario is Bo'ness scrapyard and what if it hadn't become scrap friendly and became Scotland's answer to Barry Scrapyard? Certainly more LNER and Scottish locomotives may had survived but if might've stopped the SRPS from using Bo'ness as a location, then again I'm not sure about the latter.

 

That rings true. The BUR's plan to use Kriegsloks as primary motive power seems to have been based upon Symes' assumption that the Nazis must have built a few of them to the British loading gauge in preparation for invasion and that some of them must still survive somewhere in Eastern Europe. The problem with that assumption was that there is no evidence of any such machines being built and that even if they had been and even if they had survived the war, tracking them down at the height of the Cold War and then persuading whichever Warsaw Pact country possessed them to sell a job lot of the things would have been challenging in the extreme.

 

If only we had more Scottish engines in preservation! Though looking at that list with the KFRPS/FHR, us getting more Caley engines instead of NB engines for a proud NB section of Scotland? Scandalous

 

Spaven suggests that a saved Waverley Route might well have stopped short at Hawick, on a "basic railway" model - and almost (he was significant in the reopening campaign) acknowledges the section south of Hawick as a lost cause. Certainly having driven that way, I struggle to see any case for it other than as a through route, where I struggle with the economic case for bypassing Beattock.

 

I have to admit I can't recall if it was mentioned whether or not the southern half of the route would stay open.

What if the SRPS had found a different location? What options would they have had?

 

The Strathspey was originally an SRPS project, and they also had a go at taking over the Alloa-Dollar line.

 

I think we're rather lucky the SRPS weren't left trying to save either of the 'Roads to the Isles'. For quite a while a few decades ago it seemed either the Mallaig line or Kyle line was doomed.

 

Alloa to Dollar was always the first choice for many SRPS members I've talked too and interestingly BR were more than happy to hand it over in 1973 after the last coal trains had worked on it. All it was just Clarkmanshire council shooting themselves in the foot thinking a heritage railway wasn't going to be good for the area, remember a heritage railway was pretty much a new concept in Scotland. If another heritage railway had started in Scotland much earlier and it's effects had been positive then there is no doubt the council would've done a U-turn.

Haddington was another choice, the second choice I believe but it was the other way round in which the Council supported it as a heritage railway but BR wanted to use the line for 'strategic purposes' and that project died a death.