Description

North British Railway, 1894. Single storey, rectangular-plan station waiting room with adjoining observation tower signal box, Type 6b.

Rendered brick with banded dressings. Recessed round-arched door to centre. Butressing at corner angles. Projecting eaves with exposed timber brackets. Grey slate with terracotta ridge tiles. Coped end stacks with clay cans. Shouldered chimney projection to N gable end.

Linking section to S joining waiting room to tall, 2-stage, square-plan signal box tower. Pyramidal capped roof with timber bracketed eaves and slate roof. Continuous glazing to upper stage. Single storey, half-piended outshot to S with half-timbered infill to E and projecting wallhead stack breaking eaves to S.

Timber windows to signal box with glazing pattern: 2-pane to lower section; 6-pane to upper section.

Statement of Interest

Corrour is an unusual survival of a station on the public rail network originally built by North British Railway to serve a private estate. It is the most remote operational train station in the UK and also the highest at over 1300 feet above sea level. The 'estate style' architecture of the waiting room with its polychromatic banded brickwork, doorway, bracketed eaves and end stacks add to its interest as an example of its building type. The building of a private estate road allowing access to Corrour by car was completed by the Forestry Commission in 1972. Previously, the station was only accessible by train.

Signal boxes are a distinctive and increasingly rare building type that make a significant contribution to Scotland's diverse industrial heritage. Of more than 2000 signal boxes built across Scotland by 1948, around 150 currently survive (2013) with all pre-1948 mechanical boxes still in operation on the public network due to become obsolete by 2021. The signal box at Corrour is a non-standard version of the North British Railway's Type 6b, modified to complement the style of the adjacent station waiting room and is therefore also an unusual example of its type. The 6b shares characteristics with the smaller, square-plan Type 6a at many of the island platform stations on the West Highland Line including Rannoch, Upper Tyndrum, Bridge of Orchy and Garelochead (see separate listings).

Sir John Stirling Maxwell, Tory MP, Chairman of the Forestry Commission and a founder member of the National Trust for Scotland, bought Corrour in 1891 to operate it primarily as a hunting estate. The West Highland Railway Line opened in 1894 and Corrour Station was built the same year to serve the sporting estate. Permission for the West Highland Railway Company to run the line through the estate is understood to have been on the condition that a station be built at Corrour. It is of the island platform type with the up and down lines running either side and an additional siding to the east. Passenger trains have used the down platform only since 1985. The station featured in the film adaptation of Trainspotting by Irvine Welsh.

Listed as part of Scottish Signal Box Review (2012-13).

External Links

• Historic Environment Scotland Listing
• Wikidata Q77782381

External links are from the relevant listing authority and, where applicable, Wikidata. Wikidata IDs may be related buildings as well as this specific building. If you want to add or update a link, you will need to do so by editing the Wikidata entry.

Recommended Books

• 
  Huddersfield in 50 Buildings
• 
  Harrow on the Hill: A photographic portrayal of listed buildings and structures (Historic Buildings Picture Guides)
• 
  Pioneers of Modern Design: From William Morris to Walter Gropius (Penguin Art & Architecture)
• 
  [(Cumberland and Westmorland)] [By (author) Nikolaus Pevsner] published on (January, 1967)
• 
  A Buying and Owning a Listed Building: A Brief Guide
• 
  Oxfordshire: North and West (Pevsner Architectural Guides: Buildings of England)