Forres Railway Station


(Farrais)

A railway station in NE Moray, Forres (known in Gaelic as Farrais) is located on the single-track Aberdeen-Inverness Line, a quarter-mile (0.5 km) west northwest of the town centre. Forres gained its first station on the Inverness & Aberdeen Junction Railway in 1858, located close to the present site. The station was moved a short distance to the southwest in 1863, when the branch to Perth via Dava and Aviemore opened, resulting in a complex triangle of lines and goods sidings associated with the movement of agricultural products, timber, whisky and coal. There was once also an engine shed and a turntable. A new brick-built station building opened in 1955 with five platforms but within a decade the Dava branch had closed, a victim of railway rationalisation, and Forres became much less important. The goods sidings were subsequently lifted, leaving an overly-large station with only one operational platform, on an embayment in the line, which featured curves that reduced the speed of non-stopping through-services. Thus, in 2017, a new station was opened by local MSP Richard Lochhead, close the site of the original 1858 station, on a new straight mile-long double-track section of railway, which removed the old embayment. The project cost £80 million and were delivered by contractors BAM Nuttall for Network Rail.

Operated by ScotRail, Forres Railway Station is staffed part-time and is used by 123,298 passengers per annum (2016-17). It is preceded by Elgin Railway Station, 12 miles (19 km) to the east, and followed by Nairn, 9½ miles (15 km) to the west.


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