Killochan railway station
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Killochan | |||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
 Killochan Station looking towards Ayr | |||||
| General information | |||||
| Location | Between Dailly and Girvan Scotland | ||||
| Coordinates | 55°16′02″N 4°48′00″W / 55.267314°N 4.800088°W | ||||
| Grid reference | NS 22193 00592 | ||||
| Platforms | 2 | ||||
| History | |||||
| Original company | Maybole and Girvan Railway | ||||
| Pre-grouping | Glasgow and South Western Railway | ||||
| Post-grouping | London, Midland and Scottish Railway | ||||
| Key dates | |||||
| 24 May 1860 | Opened[1] | ||||
| 1 January 1951 | Closed[2] | ||||
| |||||
Killochan railway station was located in a rural part of South Ayrshire, Scotland and mainly served the nearby Killochan Castle estate.[3] The Killochan bank is the name given to this section of the line, running from Girvan on an uphill gradient to just north of the old station site.[4] Maybole is around nine miles away and Girvan two miles.
Station infrastructure
Opened to serve the Killochan Castle estate and surrounding population in 1860[5] by the Maybole and Girvan Railway it closed in 1951.[6] before the era of the Beeching cuts.
Killochan Colliery (aka Bargany Pit), Craigie No. 1 Section, Parish of Dailly was still working up until the 1970s and had a coal washing plant that was used to treat coal from the other pits in the valley.[7][8] A station solely for the use of miners was located at Bargany, known as Bargany Colliery Platform, opened at an unrecorded date and closed in July 1926.[9]
Grangeston Halt railway station was located nearby as a private facility used by staff from the ICI munitions plant at Grangeston during WWII and closed in 1965.
It was originally on a single track section that was later doubled and had two platforms with a signal box, goods yards with a loading dock and a goods shed.[10] The dwelling house was a two-storeyed English Arts and Crafts structure with a very attractive single-storeyed glass conservatory-like waiting rooms section. Like Cassillis railway station that also served a castle and country estate, the main building was rebuilt circa 1900.[11]
A quarry once lay nearby and a narrow gauge railway crossed the line bringing stone into the Killochan goods yard for loading into standard gauge goods trucks.[12] In 1965 the signal box was still present as was the second platform and the old toilet block.[13] A 1970 photograph shows the station substantially intact despite closure in 1951 although only a single platform remains.[14] By 2011 the station buildings had been much altered with the signal box gone, toilet block demolished, waiting room converted into a garage and the substantial chimneys removed from the two storey station house.[15]
