The passenger railway in Levenmouth, Fife reopened for the first time in over 50 years on Sunday 2 June.
It’s reconnected local communities to the railway for the first time since 1969, with the help of a 9km long track and two new accessible stations.
The project in numbers
The £117m project began in January 2022 and took over two years to complete. It involved:
- two new stations
- 35km of rail
- 75,000 tonnes of ballast
- 29,000 sleepers
- 15 signals
- 20km of fencing
- three sets of points
- 5km of track drainage
- 20km of fencing.
A boost to the community
Passenger services are expected to be extremely popular. There’ll be about 37 trains running hourly to and from Edinburgh to Levenmouth every day, with a slightly reduced service on Sundays. This would roughly be equal to about 1,000 trains every four weeks.
We expect the reinstatement of the railway in Levenmouth to give a boost to the community of 37,000. Levenmouth previously made up the largest urban area in Scotland without a direct rail link. We hope the reopening will mean more opportunities for locals and attract new business and investment.
Joe Mulvenna, a project manager for the Levenmouth Rail Link project at Network Rail, said: “The return of the railway to these communities for the first time in more than five decades is momentous and life-changing.”
A greener approach
Our approach to the work since the beginning in January 2022 has been environmentally friendly. Everything we removed from the work sites, including 80,000 tonnes of spoil, disused track and old ballast, were either re-used or re-purposed in the building of the new line or offered to heritage railways. Not a drop ended up in landfills.
We also teamed up with local wildlife charity Forth Rivers Trust to put up bat boxes along the line to support the local bat population. It followed on from the initial removal of trees along the route to clear the space for the new railway. The trust installed the boxes in places where the work wouldn’t disturbed them.
We’ve also prepared the line for electrification that will allow for greener, cleaner and more reliable trains to run here in the future. This supports our plans to cut carbon for net-zero emissions railway in Scotland by 2045.
