HYNDFORD
THE SCENE
The Royal Burgh of Hyndford is situated approximately 30 miles south east of Glasgow in rich agricultural land.
Hyndford is the main market town in the area and for many years its livestock market on a Monday drew farmers from all over the locality. The Burgh and its market were served by a short branch running off the West Coast Main Line about 15 miles south of Motherwell.
Exactly why this branch survived when so many others didn’t is not clear. But survive it did, although the original double track has been reduced to a single line. The passenger station sits above a stretch of, an earlier form of transport, namely the Lanarkshire and Peebles Canal, which predated the railway and was a not entirely successful attempt to exploit both agriculture and coal in the area.
The town is still a centre for the local farming community but now the only livestock the railway handles is the daily commuter rush to Glasgow.
The canal has recently been restored using Millennium Lottery funding and there are hopes that it will become a tourist attraction.
The low-level goods yard has been converted to a small Permanent Way Engineers Depot, which is accessed by means of a swing bridge over the canal. On the approaches to the PW depot a coal handling plant for one of the area’s many open cast coal mines has been built on this site which allows easy access to the main line.
THE TRUTH
Those of you who know anything about Lanarkshire will realise that the above is entirely fictional. The Royal Burgh of Lanark sits where Hyndford supposedly does. The canal above never existed, but there are some grains of truth in the legend. Hyndford Bridge crosses the Clyde just outside the town and there is a coal loading facility at nearby Ravenstruther (pronounced Renstrie for goodness knows what reason!). The M74 motorway does exist but never gets to within 10 miles of Lanark. On the layout the station buildings are accurate reproductions of Lanark.
