An award for the Friends of Wemyss Bay Station

Friday, October 23, 2009.
Posted by Nancy Cameron (ncameron0@googlemail.com).

On Thursday, 22nd October, the Friends were surprised and delighted to be presented with a certificate naming us as the Best Adopted Station in Scotland in 2009, by Passenger Focus, the independent passenger watchdog.

We were expecting a visit from the Managing Director of First ScotRail, Steve Montgomery, and the Finance Director, Kenny McPhail, as part of their 5th anniversary tour of stations. The programme of repairs to Wemyss Bay Station is underway - a welcome sight to all of us who live locally - and the Friends are credited with encouraging Network Rail to embark on this programme, which is supported by the Railway Heritage Trust.

Our efforts at bringing flowers back on to the station concourse, and our use of empty accommodation for community use, as bookshop and gallery, were cited as the reasons for the award.

We, in turn, were glad to be able to present them with copies of our first publication, 'The Caledonian Railway's Wemyss Bay Station', a collection of photographs of the building of the station in 1903, with its interesting history of that period.