17/05/2026
It’s the birthday of another early Scottish railway :)
Happy Birthday to Scotland's first 'Modern Railway'.
Opened this day in 1826, the Monkland & Kirkintilloch Railway was built to carry coal from the Monklands to the Forth & Clyde Canal at Kirkintilloch.
It wasn't Scotland's first railway - that was the Tranent-Cockenzie Waggonway; it wasn't Scotland's first public railway as the Kilmarnock & Troon Railway takes that honour. But it was the first 'modern' railway in Scotland from its concept and technology.
An Act of Parliament was granted on 17 May 1824. Share capital was £32,000 and the company had powers to raise a further £10,000 by additional shares or by borrowing. The engineer for the railway was Thomas Grainger and work got underway by the end of the year.
It was laid to a gauge of 4ft 6in using wrought-iron rails and Grainger placed adverts in English newspapers seeking to recruit:
"A person, who has considerable experience, and thoroughly understands the most improved method of laying Rail-road Bars, practised in the neighbourhood of Newcastle to act as FOREMAN in laying rails on the Monkland and Kirkintilloch Rail-way."
This was a great technological leap in the dark: whilst wrought-iron rails had been known and used in Scotland since 1808, and indeed Birkenshaw rails were in use before 1825, this was the first railway in Britain to be laid entirely with wrought-iron: the Stockton & Darlington was laid half cast-iron and half wrought-iron.
It cost £32,000 to build and was opened on 17 May 1826 when a horse dragged a load of 16 tons from Craghill Colliery to Kirkintilloch.
A timetabled passenger service began in 1828 - not the first in Scotland, however, as the Kilmarnock & Troon Railway of 1812 had a timetabled passenger service from the opening. In fact, the use of the term 'station' to refer to a place on a railway where one could board a train or load/unload wagons was in connection with the K&TR.
For the first four years of its existence the line was worked by horses, but with the resounding success of the Liverpool & Manchester line, the M&KR adopted locomotives, although of a curiously archaic design with vertical cylinders, but fitted with a multi-tubular boiler. Eventually five such machines were built - but they were not quite the first locomotives built in Scotland. The plucky little 'Perseverance' built by Timothy Burstall of Leith for the Rainhill Trials (1829) was the first locomotive to be built in the country. Whilst 'Perseverance' was built in Scotland by a Scotsman, the M&KR locos were designed by a sasnach named Dodds.
The first proposal for a locomotive-worked railway was as early as 1813 when the use of Blenkinsop-type locomotives on the K&TR was seriously considered: Scotland was in no way a backwater compared to south of the border.
The success of the M&KR inspired a mini-railway mania in Scotland. But this mean that it was, however, rapidly left behind technologically with the opening of the Glasgow & Garnkirk Railway as Scotland's first 'Mainline' Railway in September 1831, replete with Stephenson Planet locomotives.
Still the M&KR has an importance place in railway history as Scotland's first 'modern railway.'🏴
You can find out more about the M&KR in 'Early Railways of Scotland' by Ed Bethune and Anthony Dawson.
