Skye Marble Railway

Time for a little more history...

The Skye Marble Company set up a quarry in the Kilchrist area of Skye near the foot of Ben Suardal, however they had problems transporting their produce to the then new pier at Broadford. In the latter half of the 1890's the grandiose schemes for lines across the majority of Skye were taking place, however none of these ever got off the ground. This consequently left the marble company still unable to transport their wares further afield to somewhere like the pier. In 1904 a 3'6" gauge line was opened from Kilchrist to Broadford Pier at a cost of £30,000 including the construction of a bridge to span the Broadford River so that it could connect to the pier.

The line was initially operated by horse power, however this clearly wasn't sufficient as Skye Marble Ltd. purchased two locos. The first is conspicuously absent from all sources of information on the line, however there is substantially more information about the second.

It was a Hunslet 0-4-0ST named 'Skylark' (works number 564 of 1892). This loco was initially delivered to T.S. Dixon with the name of 'Bruckless' in May 1892 for use in the construction of the Donegal to Kilbegys section of the County Donegal Railway in Ireland. It was sold in 1894 following completion of the line and was subsequently purchased by the Preston Corporation Waterworks Department for use in the construction of their 'Spade Mill no. 1 Reservoir'. It was here that it gained the name 'Skylark'. In the period between July 1897 and March 1905 the loco was under the ownership of the Newcastle & Gateshead Waterworks. It was from this owner that it was transferred to the ownership of Skye Marble in 1907.

There are some images of the loco and some of the quarry operation reproduced in 'Last Ferry to Skye' by Christopher J Uncles.

The company quarried material from their site at Kilchrist using a partly Belgian migrant workforce. The company seemed prosperous throughout the early years of the 20th century, however by 1913/14 the company had gone into liquidation. Like many schemes of this era it didn't prove as lucrative as first thought, however if it had lasted a while longer I don't think that it could survived the loss of large numbers of islanders to the front during World War 1. By 1914 the company had dismantled it's works at Kilbride and demolished the workers cottages. The managers house, the shop and quarries were all vacant and the railway was derelict.

'Skylark' was sold in May 1914 to John Mackay of Dublin Waterworks, and it ended it's days back in Ireland where it had been initially delivered.

In the 1980s there was a skip wagon from the line that was still visible in the forecourt of a garage at Breakish near Broadford. These wagons arrived at the garage from a short line at Ord quarry on the West of Sleat, having previously operated on the Skye Marble network. Traces of the line on the pier were beginning to disappear during the 1980s when it was coated with new layers of tarmac, subsequently burying the rails.

I hope to walk the entire course of the line the next time I go to Skye, and will post some images of the route on here when I do.

There were several other minor industrial lines on Skye, I will cover each of these in turn in future blog posts.