Social injustice, government incompetence and unfair treatment laid bare as author delves into archives surrounding Ross-shire railway projects; A Quite Impossible Proposal: How not to Build a Railway sheds light on determined proposals for Garve to Ullapool rail link and elsewhere in Highlands and islands

A FASCINATING new book drawing extensively on original source material tells the story of the rail connections that could have transformed the Ross-shire economy in the nineteenth century and beyond.

In A Quite Impossible Proposal: How not to Build a Railway, Andy Drummond uncovers the remarkable story of how local support for various schemes was stymied by rival railway companies and ultimately ignored by politicians. A proposed route from Garve to Ullapool was quashed five times between 1890 and 1945.

This route would have expedited the transport of fish south from Stornoway and connected remote communities. Railheads at Aultbea, Laxford and Lochinver were also included in proposals and an Act of Parliament for the Ullapool line was passed in 1890. It was later to be deemed a "quite impossible proposal".

"Almost every item I turned up in the archives revealed a new twist in the whole sorry saga. And it turned into a story about the theft of crofters’ land, about social injustice and economic hardship, about employment and emigration, about government incompetence and the obstructionism of private railway companies." - Andy Drummond

Mr Drummond, who in 2004 published a novel imagining the building of the railway, uncovered a story that ran the gamut from local activism, via numerous boardrooms to the corridors of Whitehall. He said that to begin with, it was quite simple: a strange and unlikely story about a railway to Ullapool that was never built. He said: "It all seemed bizarre, almost comical. But as I dug deeper into the story, I found layer after layer of a slightly different history.

"I discovered that Ullapool had not been singled out for unfair treatment. Several other villages up and down the west coast had also been deprived of the chance of a railway. The same had happened on Skye and on Lewis. And then I learned that several different attempts had been made to get a railway to Ullapool. I found a whole cast of likeable characters determined to fight for their railway every step of the way. But almost every item I turned up in the archives revealed a new twist in the whole sorry saga. And it turned into a story about the theft of crofters’ land, about social injustice and economic hardship, about employment and emigration, about government incompetence and the obstructionism of private railway companies.

"These railways in themselves remain historical curiosities; but they stand out as symbols of the ignominious failure of private capital and government – failure to provide a critical piece of infrastructure to a hard-pressed people in the 19th and 20th centuries."

One of those colourful characters was Sir John Fowler, a designer of both the Forth Bridge and London’s Metropolitan Railway, who had purchased the Braemore estate near Ullapool in 1865. He had a replica tunnel built in its grounds. Although his sons Arthur and Montague campaigned for the railway in the 1890s and 1918 respectively, that was the closest Ullapool was ever to come to having a railway.

A Quite Impossible Proposal: How not to Build a Railway by Andrew Drummond is published by Birlinn (£20, paperback)

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