Broughty Ferry railway station serves the suburban town of
Broughty FerryBroughty Ferry is a suburb in the eastern side of the City of Dundee, situated on the shore of the Firth of Tay in eastern Scotland...
in
DundeeDundee is the fourth-largest city in Scotland and, fully named as Dundee City, one of Scotland's 32 local government council areas. It lies on the north bank of the Firth of Tay, which feeds into the North Sea....
,
ScotlandScotland is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. Occupying the northern third of the island of Great Britain, it shares a border with England to the south and is bounded by the North Sea to the east, the Atlantic Ocean to the north and west, and the North Channel and Irish Sea to the...
. The station was opened on 6 October 1838 on the
Dundee and Arbroath RailwayThe Dundee and Arbroath Railway was a railway link between those two towns in Scotland which ran along the banks of the River Tay.-History:The railway company received its Parliamentary Act on 19 May 1836. It was planned as a gauge railway, because, at that time, it was expected to be a purely...
. When
North British RailwayThe North British Railway was a Scottish railway company that was absorbed into the London and North Eastern Railway at the Grouping in 1923.-History:...
were granted joint ownership of the line on 21 July 1879, the station buildings were gradually rebuilt until around 1900.
British Rail operated local passenger services between Dundee and Arbroath until around 1990. Since these were discontinued, most of the intermediate stations have had only a very sparse service, provided so as to avoid the difficulty of formal closure procedures. Currently (summer 2008)
First ScotRailFirst ScotRail is the FirstGroup train operating company running domestic passenger trains within Scotland and the cross-border Caledonian Sleeper service to London. However, the company has now been renamed ScotRail - Scotland's Railway....
provides Broughty Ferry with only two trains a day towards Carnoustie and three trains per day towards Dundee, Mondays to Saturdays. These offer through service to/from Edinburgh and Glasgow, but are not timed conveniently for passengers wishing to commute to Dundee, who were historically the station's
raison d'êtreRaison d'être is a phrase borrowed from French where it means "reason for being"; in English use, it also comes to suggest a degree of rationalization, as "The claimed reason for the existence of something or someone"....
. There is also a mid morning service (1043) to Edinburgh but again is not at a very handy time. Consequently, patronage of the station is now very low.
Level crossing incident
At 7:20 pm on 21 October 1991, a Dundee bound
AberdeenAberdeen railway station is a railway station in Aberdeen, Scotland, UK.- History :The station currently standing was built as Aberdeen Joint Station between 1913-16, replacing an 1867 structure of the same name, on the same site...
–London
Intercity expressThe InterCity 125 was the brand name of British Rail's High Speed Train fleet. The InterCity 125 train is made up of two power cars, one at each end of a fixed formation of carriages, and is capable of in regular service. Initially the sets were classified as Classes 253 and 254...
destroyed two out of the four gates of the level crossing. The fifty passengers on board and five people in a passing car were fortunate to avoid collision when the train passed through the crossing at around 80 miles per hour. The gates had not been closed before the train passed the level crossing. Dundee City Council had previously postponed planning permission to modernise the gates. They were replaced by the current arrangement of four barriers in 1995, with control transferred to Dundee Signalling Centre.
Subsequent restoration of the station saw the removal of the historic footbridge, which now languishes behind the westbound platform, leaving only an underpass for those wishing to cross the line at Gray Street, or the walk the short distance to another overbridge, when the barriers are lowered. The footbridge was closed to the public before the crossing was modernised.
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