Kirkconnel railway station


Kirkconnel railway station is a railway station in the town of Kirkconnel, Dumfries and Galloway, Scotland. The station is unstaffed, owned by Network Rail and managed by ScotRail.

History

Kirkconnel is situated on the former Glasgow and South Western Railway main line between and. It was one of the few stations on the route to avoid the Beeching Axe in the mid-1960s and was the only intermediate station between Kilmarnock and Dumfries for many years.

The railway poet

A plaque at the station commemorates Alexander Anderson, the poet from Kirkconnel, who rose from being a railway worker to become Chief Librarian at the University of Edinburgh. He was a surfaceman or platelayer on the Glasgow and South Western Railway, and generally wrote under the name of Surfaceman.

Services

On Monday to Saturdays, there are nine trains per day in each direction towards Dumfries and Glasgow Central running on a mostly two-hourly frequency. However, there can be gaps up to four hours at certain times of the day. On Sundays, there is a very limited service of two trains per day in each direction towards Carlisle and Glasgow.
There was previously one train a day to Newcastle on Monday to Saturdays, however this was stopped in the May 2022 timetable change.