IT was in this week in 1831 that Scotland ’s first formal passenger railway service was officially opened, linking Glasgow to Garnkirk in Lanarkshire. Now that rail is making a comeback as a greener form of transport , thanks to enlightened investment by the Scottish Government , it is worth looking back to the infancy of the railways in Scotland.

At that time, the “Rush for Rail” saw the “Permanent Way” installed all over the countryside, especially in the central belt where development was linked to a very “un-green” source – the huge increase in demand for coal as domestic and industrial consumption soared.

It is generally accepted that Scotland’s first purpose-built railway line was between Kilmarnock and Troon – don’t bother checking with Wikipedia, because its guff on Scottish transport history is just plain wrong about early Scottish railways.

The Kilmarnock to Troon line was commissioned by William Henry Cavendish-Scott-Bentinck, the Marquess of Titchfield and later the 4th Duke of Portland, who employed engineer William Jessop to construct a railway between his collieries at Kilmarnock and the harbour at Troon on the Firth of Clyde.

The Marquess had to obtain an Act of Parliament to build the line, and helpfully he was the MP for Buckingham at the time.

The Act was passed in 1808, shortly before the Marquess’s father died and he became the Duke of Portland.

The 4ft gauge line was more than nine miles in length, and cost £60,000 when it was opened in 1811.

The coal was carried in hoppers drawn by horses, but six years later it became the first non-equine railway in Scotland when George Stephenson created Scotland’s first site-specific steam locomotive at a cost of £750. It was given the name The Duke.

Ploughing back and forth along the line delivering coal to Troon from where it mostly went to Ireland, The Duke would stay in service only for a short time as apparently its weight was too great for the primitive railway tracks.

This was an era when a combination of entrepreneurial spirit and municipal pride saw demand for railways to be built just about everywhere, but there was often fierce local opposition, so for a while Scotland lagged behind England and Wales in rail construction.

The first successful public railway in Scotland was the Monklands and Kirkintilloch Railway which was built to undercut the cost of transporting coal from the Lanarkshire pits to Glasgow and Edinburgh.

The Monkland Canal had a monopoly on that transport and the new railway, designed with “edge” rails and thus able to use steam locomotives, proved highly successful from 1826 in taking coal transport off the canal and on to the rail tracks.

That was the fundamental driver for the new railways – easier transport boosted profits by cutting costs massively, especially when up against monopolistic canals.

Next came the Garnkirk and Glasgow Railway which was formally launched as a company in 1826. It connected with the Monkland and Kirkintilloch Railway and had the same gauge, 4ft 6ins, though many years later it was converted to the “standard gauge” of 4ft 8.5 ins.

Again its construction was approved by Act of Parliament, though the railway company had to go back to Parliament when its costs overran due to bad weather.

The sponsors, who included the giant Charles Tennant bleaching works at St Rollox near Townhead in Glasgow, were innovative and far-seeing, because they built the railway with tracks that would allow the provision for steam locomotives that would carry passengers.

They also planned for a double track which would allow more trains to pass along their line and avoid the oft-repeated problem of single lines being blocked by derailments.

COAL would remain by far the biggest freight carried on the line which linked via the Monklands and Kirkintilloch Railway to the Forth and Clyde Canal that gave access to the markets of both Glasgow and Edinburgh.

In early 1831, the Garnkirk and Glasgow Railway’s owners decided to open a passenger service. By June of that year, they had acquired a steam locomotive from Newcastle-based Robert Stephenson & Co, pioneers of what were termed “self-propelled vehicles”.

It was Stephenson’s Rocket which largely brought steam locomotion to railway lines where horses had traditionally been the source of power.

A version of Stephenson’s Rocket was adapted for the Garnkirk and Glasgow Railway, with the new locomotive being named St Rollox after the Tennant works at Townhead where the terminus of the new line was also located.

The decision was made to bring in the planned double line and this was completed quite quickly in the summer of 1831.

So it was on September 27, some weeks after the line began to operate, that the Garnkirk and Glasgow Railway was formally opened with a grand ceremony. From the outset it carried passengers and proved a hit with people who had previously relied on horses or Shanks’s pony to travel between Glasgow and the towns of Lanarkshire.

All the lines that sprang up around Glasgow and Lanarkshire were still known as the “coal railways”, however, testifying to the importance of the black stuff in the 19th-century industrialisation of Scotland.