The Edinburgh Suburban and Southside Junction Railway was a railway company that built an east-west railway (known as the Edinburgh Suburban Line or more familiarly the Sub) on the southern margin of Edinburgh, Scotland, primarily to facilitate the operation of heavy goods and mineral traffic across the city. The line opened in 1884. Although its route was rural at the time, suburban development quickly caught up and passenger carryings on the line were buoyant; the passenger service operated on a circular basis through Edinburgh Waverley railway station.
Bus and tram competition hit the passenger service badly as the twentieth century progressed, and in 1962 the line closed to local passenger trains. It continues in use for freight traffic and diverted and excursion passenger trains.
There have frequently been proposals to reintroduce the local passenger service on the line, but there is no active commitment to do so.
History
Railway traffic through Edinburgh
The Edinburgh and Glasgow Railway (E&GR) opened its main line in 1842 between Glasgow and the station at Edinburgh that became Haymarket station, at the western margin of the city. It showed that longer-distance railways could be successful, and encouraged the idea of connecting central Scotland with England; the North British Railway (NBR) opened its line from the station at North Bridge in Edinburgh to Berwick (later known as Berwick-upon-Tweed in 1846, and within a few weeks the E&GR opened an extension from Haymarket to its own station at North Bridge. There was a link for the transfer of wagons, but for the time being the two companies operated separate stations adjacent to one another.
Meanwhile, the Caledonian Railway was constructing its line from Edinburgh to Glasgow and Carlisle, running from Lothian Road station, and opening in 1847 - 1848. (The Caledonian later relocated to Princes Street station.)
The Caledonian line remained separate, and later a serious competitor, but the E&GR and the NBR were obviously complementary. The North Bridge station was extremely rudimentary at first and the two companies collaborated in improving it and making a shared station, and it was later renamed Waverley Station. Nonetheless the site was extremely cramped and for many years the accommodation was notoriously inadequate.
In 1865 the E&GR and the NBR amalgamated, keeping the name The North British Railway, and the opening of branch lines had led to substantially heavier traffic. The line through Waverley station was the only link between the lines east and west of Edinburgh. Mineral traffic increased considerably as the Lothian coalfield (south-east of Edinburgh) was developed, and much of the extracted mineral was consigned to the west of Scotland for shipment. All the goods and mineral traffic had to pass along the double track route from Portobello to Haymarket through Waverley station, finding a path between the increasingly frequent passenger services.
First proposals
The congestion was obviously serious, with no apparent solution on the route through Waverley. The line lay in a valley between very high ground on an east-west alignment, and any railway by-passing Waverley would have to be aligned south of the volcanic plug that forms Salisbury Crags and Arthur's Seat. In 1865 the NBR proposed a line from Haymarket to connect with the former Edinburgh and Dalkeith Railway near its terminus on the south side of the city. The Dalkeith line, now in NBR control, connected near Niddrie (often spelt Niddry at the time) with the NBR main line to Berwick and the Dalkeith route to the mineral fields. The Caledonian Railway too saw this as an opportunity to secure an advantage over its rival, and in the same year it too proposed a similar route from its own lines near Gorgie to Niddrie, intending to claim running powers over the NBR lines to get access to the Lothian coal fields. However neither of these schemes was progressed.
An Act for the ESS&SJR
Over the following years the congestion and the difficulty of working through Waverley station increased further, and the proposed construction of the Forth Bridge from 1871, promising much more traffic to the NBR at Edinburgh, intensified the perception that a resolution must be implemented. A Parliamentary Bill was prepared by the North British Railway, although the line was to be built by a nominally independent company.