IMAGES TAKEN NEAR TO
McKinlay Crescent, ALLOA, FK10 3RX

Looking towards Alloa.

Shops on Whins Road.

Although the Stirling-Alloa Railway line is shortly to reopen to passenger traffic, this part of the line, east of the rebuilt Alloa station will not see passengers, as the route here onwards to the Forth Bridge is to be freight only. The building work on the right-hand side is a new Aldi store due to open in the Autumn of 2007.

An earlier view, shows the site under development [https://www.geograph.org.uk/photo/444885].

Looking east.

The station clock is in position, though in good railway fashion it is already running about twenty minutes late! The station and its new passenger service are to be ceremonially opened in less than three weeks and finishing touches are still be made to the building on the platform. Most signage has not yet been erected, though there is a strange red one by the exit that, if one turns one's head on one side, reads "Alloa Station". Is this intended for those who come back from a hard night's clubbing in Stirling on the last train and fall flat on the platform as they descend from the train?

Opened in 2008 by Network Rail as the terminus of the branch from Stirling, replacing an earlier station some 300m behind the camera position which had closed to passengers in 1968. View east towards the 10 year-old passenger terminus, shortly after the line had been electrified. The vegetation has also matured since Image was taken.

In two months from the taking of this photograph this newly re-laid railway and station will open for the first public passenger trains to Alloa for nearly forty years and numerous men in orange high-visibility jackets have been checking that the associated new signalling arrangements will work satisfactorily. The track at the platform ends at a buffer stop and the track to the left is a separate goods line continuing through to Kincardine, which will enable coal imported via Hunterston on the Firth of Clyde to be carried to Longannet power station, Fife, by a more direct route than going round by the Forth Bridge. The flats on the left, known by their builder as "The Junction", had only recently been completed and the Asda supermarket, on the site of a former Skol lager brewery, was also brand-new.