This book is a photographic journey through the railways of southern Scotland, from Paisley and Carstairs in the north to Stranraer, Gretna Green, and Tweedmouth in the south. The railway network in this area is a pale shadow of its former self, with the major omission being the line direct from Dumfries to Stranraer, but the author has produced a volume that well illustrates the various changes to motive power, liveries and services over the last 30 years.

Published in September 2023 by Key Publishing and written by Colin Alexander and Bob Kelley, this soft cover book is No. 28 in the publisher’s “Britain’s Railways” series. It measures around 24.3 cm x 17 cm, has 96 pages and 100 illustrations, and has a published price of £15.99 from Key Publishing and Amazon.

With six chapters, the book starts with the West Coast Main Line from Carstairs, then continues with The Borders Railway from Edinburgh, services from Paisley to Ayr and the Clyde Coast lines, Freight Traffic around Ayr, the line through the sparsely-populated area from Ayr to Stranraer, and finally the former Glasgow and South West line from Kilmarnock to Gretna Green.

The captions are concise with relevant information including date, motive power, service. and location, but the whereabouts of some locations quoted would only be known to locals familiar with the area, such as Float and Lamington Viaducts.

The photos below are a good representation of the author’s skills at showing trains as part of the landscape. Here trains are seen at Crawford on the West Coast Main Line crossing and alongside the infant River Clyde. No. 71000 Duke of Gloucester at the top right brings back scenes from 60 years ago when steam still reigned on West Coast expresses.

After much campaigning, part of the former Waverley route from Edinburgh to Carlisle reopened in 2015, but only as far as Tweedbank. Since then it has been a popular route for steam specials as seen below.

One of the gems on Scotland’s railways must be Wemyss Bay station seen below, which thankfully has avoided being destroyed in the name of so-called modernisation.

The pages below bring back memories of when Ayrshire was a prodigious coal mining area, which required large numbers of trains hauled by a variety of motive power to transport the mines’ output.

In the latter half of 2023, the scenes below became just a memory because a fire at Ayr closed the line between there and Stranraer. Because of health and safety issues, trains could not proceed beyond Ayr and were replaced by buses, with no date in sight for the resumption of train services.

In the 30 years covered by this book the railway scene in Scotland has changed quite dramatically, with changes in liveries, motive power, and the nature of freight traffic. In the selection of photographs that the author has chosen, the reader can appreciate just how much has changed. Perhaps one of the major changes has been the decimation of the Ayrshire coal industry, but memories of that traffic are rekindled in Chapter 4.

Some of the liveries are now but a memory, such as Strathclyde Passenger Transport’s carmine and cream livery shown in some photographs in the chapter on Paisley and the Clyde Coast Lines.

These should serve as a message that we should record what we see as familiar today, as in a few years time they may be consigned to history.

The geography of Scotland means that Edinburgh cannot be considered as part of the south of Scotland, but the author has quite sensibly chosen to include the Borders Line to Tweedbank.

In many of the photographs the author’s composition enhances the image from a simple photograph of a railway train to a pleasing appreciation of the landscape. A minor criticism is that although the captions are well-written and fully-detailed, the location names will only be familiar to anyone who knows the area.

This is a well-structured book with just enough text in each chapter’s introduction to provide a good appreciation of the photographs that follow, all of which are well composed and reproduced.

The book is available to purchase from Amazon and from Key Publishing.

We would like to thank Key Publishing for providing us with a copy of the book for review.