Railway companies in Scotland to 1948

This list includes all railway companies in Scotland which were legally incorporated, but does not include companies which were unsuccessful in obtaining Parliamentary authorisation. It also shows the lines for which the various companies were originally incorporated, though in some cases they did not construct the whole of their authorised lines, and in others they eventually made additions to or deviations from the authorised lines, for which further Parliamentary authorisation had been obtained.

Source is the List of Railway Companies in Scotland (Prior to 1923), a typed-and-duplicated document now in the hands of the National Archives of Scotland, originally prepared in July 1958 by the (then) British Transport Commission's Historical Records Department, based at 23 Waterloo Place, Edinburgh, in the former offices of the North British Railway. The data have been re-sorted here to show the corporate succession of the companies as they gradually came together up to the time of the Grouping of 1923 into the LMSR and the LNER, followed by the nationalisation of 1 January 1948 as British Railways, initially under the British Transport Commission.

Abbreviations:
Rly = Railway, Co = Company, Jn = Junction, Extn = Extension, br = branch or branches
LRO = Light Railway Order under the Light Railways Act (a general Act, as distinct from a specific Act of Parliament authorising a particular line)

This page was updated 4 May 2000.