The Borders Railway connects the city of Edinburgh with Galashiels and Tweedbank in the Scottish Borders. The railway follows most of the alignment of the northern part of the Waverley Route, a former double-track line in southern Scotland and northern England that ran between Edinburgh and Carlisle. That line was controversially closed in 1969, as part of the Beeching cuts, leaving the Borders region without any access to the National Rail network. Following the closure, a campaign to revive the Waverley Route emerged. Discussion on reopening the northern part of the line came to a head during the early 2000s. Following deliberations in the Scottish Parliament, the Waverley Railway (Scotland) Act 2006 received royal assent in June 2006. The project was renamed the "Borders Railway" in August 2008, and building works began in November 2012. Passenger service on the line began on 6 September 2015, whilst an official opening by Queen Elizabeth II took place on 9 September.
The railway was rebuilt as a non-electrified, largely single-track line. Several surviving Waverley Route structures, including viaducts and tunnels, were rehabilitated and reused for the reopened railway. Passenger services run half-hourly on weekdays until 20:00, and hourly until 23:54 and on Sundays. The timetable also allows charter train promoters to run special excursion services, and for the weeks following the line opening scheduled steam trains were run.
In 1849, the North British Railway opened a line from Edinburgh through Midlothian as far as Hawick in the Scottish Borders; a further extension in 1862 brought the line to Carlisle in England.[2] The line, known as the Waverley Route after the novels of the same name by Sir Walter Scott whose stories were set in the surrounding countryside,[3][4][5] was controversially closed in January 1969 following the recommendation for its closure in the 1963 Beeching Report as an unremunerative line.[6][7][8] According to information released by the Ministry of Transport, the potential savings to British Railways from the line's closure were at least £536,000. In addition, an estimated grant of £700,000 would have been required to maintain a full service on the line.[9] The last passenger train over the Waverley Route was the Edinburgh-St Pancras sleeper on 5 January 1969 worked by Class 45 D60 Lytham St Anne's which arrived two hours late into Carlisle due to anti-closure protesters blocking the line.[10][11]
In 1992, Borders architect Simon Longland conducted a motorbike survey of the route which led him to set up the company Borders Transport Futures (BTF) to evaluate the possibility of reopening.[12][13] Having carried out feasibility work,[14][15] in 1997 the company came close to lodging Parliamentary plans for what would effectively be a long siding for timber traffic from the West Coast Main Line at Gretna to Longtown and Riccarton Junction where the line would branch off along the former Border Counties Railway to Kielder Forest.[16][12] This scheme, known as the South Borders Railway, was one of two projects promoted by BTF, the other being the North Borders Railway - a commuter line from Edinburgh to Galashiels.[17] There were no plans to link the two lines.[18] The South Borders Railway ran into difficulties as a result of the unwillingness of landowners to sell land.[16]