Still Innocent

Last week I spent a few days working in Edinburgh. You may remember that I've been to Edinburgh with work before when I discovered the Innocent Railway. On that occasion I only walked a short distance along the railway as I used it as a way of getting to the pub where we were having dinner. On this visit I was determined to try and see a little more of the line.

Having spent nearly five hours travelling to Edinburgh by train on a very warm day I decided that getting some fresh air by heading out of the city along the railway was a very good idea, so off I set. Access to the line starts at an old goods shed about five minutes from my hotel (see the previous post for more details). Once you've passed the shed you really wouldn't know you were walking along an old railway line as these photos nicely illustrate.

Originally this area was covered with lots of sidings as it was a large coal depot as well as a station. As you can see, today the area is covered in flats instead. In the second photo, if you look past the garages you can just make out the entrance to the tunnel which was one of the main features of the original line. Given that this time I was carrying my proper camera (not the tiny point and shoot thing), and it was well charged, I thought I'd shoot video as I walked through to the other side.

Okay, so that video is rather long and boring, but it's a tunnel what else did you really expect?!

Anyway once you leave the tunnel you are out of the city and into the countryside. Looking back you can see how the tunnel is cut through solid rock at the base of Arthur’s Seat. This is the point at which I left the railway on my previous visit, but this time I kept going.

It's not long before the walls get taller and the railway must have been a fairly tight fit, although I'm sure a train thundering past in the tight confines of the walls would have been impressive. Continuing on and there are the supports for a bridge that has long since disappeared. Looking at an old map it appears it was a foot bridge that simply linked the two fields at either side of the railway, I assume to give the farmer access.

From my research after my last visit I knew that as well as the tunnel and engine shed there was one more important piece of remaining infrastructure, a cast iron bridge, which I was determined to find. Fortunately if you just keep walking you can't miss it.

According to the sign on the wall the bridge spans 18ft and was erected and painted by the Shotts Iron Co. in March 1831 for the grand total of £133.10s. It goes on to say that the bridge "originally extended over the full width of the railway -- from wall to wall. The beams which are curved in top elevation are of 'L' and inverted 'T' cross-sections. They are of outstanding interest as being amongst the earliest surviving examples of their type anywhere". I assume the comment about extending the full width of the railway means that originally the wooden section spanned the entire bridge, and the tarmac covered sections are modern safety features.

I could have kept going along the railway, but I'm not sure what else there is to see and anyway I had to head back to my hotel to get some work done before meeting a colleague for dinner.

The Innocent Railway

As I briefly mentioned in a previous blog post I recently spent a few days in Edinburgh at a project meeting. I'd saved up a few blog posts so that you didn't get bored while I was gone as I didn't expect to see anything railway related (other than the inside of a Cross Country express train). In the end I actually stumbled across something interesting: The Innocent Railway.

Project meetings can be quite intensive and to lighten the load slightly one evening is set aside for a social dinner. These dinners can end up being held in interesting places; in the past I've eaten in a Slovenian Castle and a Viennese vineyard. This time the meal was being held at The Sheep Heid Inn which is apparently Scotland's oldest surviving public house having been first established in 1360. As it was a nice evening I decided to see if it was feasible to walk there from my hotel (one of the few chances for some fresh air). Google Maps was happy to generate me walking directions and while writing them down I spotted that I was crossing a feature labelled as the Innocent Railway. A little bit of tweaking the route and it became clear that whatever the Innocent Railway turned out to be I could walk along it. So I set out with plenty of time to get the pub in order to investigate properly.

The first sign that I was looking at the remains of a substantial railway was as I turned right out of St Leonard's Lane onto a bike path to be confronted by The Engine Shed. Having looked at an old map the building was actually a goods shed; the engine shed was a couple of buildings to the west and appears to have disappeared under newer housing. Even if it wasn't an engine shed, such a large goods shed (the photo only shows about a third of the length of the building) definitely suggests that the area was once home to a fair amount of railway traffic. I continued following a succession of roads and short cycleways until I almost reached Holyrood Park Road where I discovered the original feature on the map which had drawn my attention.

On the map the feature was marked by a pair of dotted lines, so I should have been able to work out that I was looking for a tunnel, and what a tunnel it turned out to be. If you were trying to find the tunnel from the main road it would look as if you were trying to find the car park for a set of modern flats. What greats you though is a well built slightly slopping railway tunnel, that runs dead straight for about 200 yards before reappearing below Arthur's Seat.

Once through the tunnel I left the railway and doubled back slightly to rejoin the main road so I could head off for dinner, but you could easily see where the railway line continued on south eastwards (the third photo). So after thoroughly enjoying my dinner I finally made it back to my hotel where I set about trying to figure out what exactly the Innocent Railway had been.

From a fairly extensive web search I discovered that the Innocent Railway was the nickname given to the Edinburgh and Dalkeith Railway. The station and goods yard at St Leonard's was Edinburgh's first railway station which opened in 1831 to help bring coal into the city from Dalkeith. The railway got it's nickname from the fact that the railway used horses rather than steam power to haul the wagons (other than through the tunnel, where a stationary steam engine was used to winch the wagons into the station). It wasn't until the railway was bought by the North British Railway in 1846 that the rails were strengthened to allow for the use of steam locomotives.

None of the railway remains in use today, as it finally closed in 1968, although the route has been fully preserved as a cycle path (of which I only walked a short part). The three main important pieces of remaining infrastructure are the goods shed, the tunnel and a cast iron bridge. While I'm sure the goods shed is a well preserved example of its time the tunnel and bridge are of more historic interest.

It appears that the tunnel was probably the first railway tunnel constructed in Scotland and was cut through the hard volcanic rock of Arthur's Seat. I didn't get to see the cast iron bridge (it's further out of Edinburgh), but just like the tunnel it is one of the earliest examples of a cast iron railway bridge to have survived.

Given the railways age I'll finish this post with a highly processed, yet atmospheric, view of the tunnel (if you are interested it was produced using the daguerreotype filter in PaintShop Pro).