Disused railway lines and closed stations in Highland

141 miles of disused railway
76 closed stations
60 stations open today
22 named lost lines

Highland has 141 miles of disused railway and 76 closed stations, against 60 stations still open today. More stations have closed here than remain: 1.3 lost for every one still served. The longest lost line is the Spean Bridge to Fort Augustus Branch, with 20 miles of its route inside Highland.

See Highland’s lost railways on the map

The map opens on the county with the disused lines and closed stations drawn over today’s network. Tap any closed station for its history, or any grey line for its name.

What is left of it

The 141 miles of lost railway in Highland break down as 123 miles with the track lifted and the trackbed still traceable, 14 miles built over or ploughed out, with little or no trace left and 3.2 miles with track still in place but no trains. These are OpenStreetMap’s own distinctions, made by the people who surveyed each stretch, so a line can appear under more than one state along its length.

Lost railway lines in Highland

22 named lines with disused track in the county, longest stretch first. The mileage is the part inside Highland; a line crossing the border is counted on both sides.

Line	Miles in county
Spean Bridge to Fort Augustus Branch	20
Wick and Lybster Light Railway	13
Boat of Garten to Craigellachie Line	13
Lochaber Narrow Gauge Railway	13
Black Isle Branch	11
Dornoch Branch	5.2
Former LNGR line	4.5
Aviemore and Forres	4.0
Connell Ferry to Ballachulish Line	3.5
Great Glen Way - Slighe a' Ghlinne Mhòir	3.4
Dingwall Fodderty Junction to Strathpeffer Line	2.4
Old Quarry Tramway	2.1
Dingwall & Skye Railway	1.9
Aviemore to Forres Line	1.6
Gollanfield to Fort George Branch	1.6
Balmenach Railway	1.2
Brora Colliery Tramway	0.9
Banavie Pier Branch	0.7
Inverness to Muirtown Basin (Caledonian Canal) Branch	0.6
West Highland Line	0.5
Munlochy old railway line path	0.4
Highland Main Line	0.3

Closed railway stations in Highland

All 76 closed and former stations in Highland, A to Z. Each name opens the map on the station; the Wikipedia link, where there is one, has its history.

Stations still open in Highland

60 stations in Highland still have a train service. The busiest are Inverness (1.2 million a year), Fort William (176,226 a year), Nairn (137,890 a year), Aviemore (123,654 a year) and Mallaig (90,476 a year). Every one has its own page, with the stations you can reach from it directly and how often the trains run: see the A to Z of stations.

Lost railways nearby

Moray, Perth and Kinross, Aberdeenshire, Stirling, Angus and Dundee.

About these figures

The disused lines are the stretches OpenStreetMap records as disused, abandoned, razed or dismantled railway, measured segment by segment and given to the county each segment lies in. The closed stations are Wikidata’s record of British railway stations no longer in service, kept where they are not within a few hundred metres of a station still open. The boundary is today’s council area, from the Office for National Statistics (Open Government Licence v3.0; contains OS data © Crown copyright and database right 2024). Historic county lines were different, and a closed station a mile over the border is on the neighbouring page.

Every county · About the disused lines layer · About the closed stations