A Nuclear Future for the North Line

Lord Thurso who owns many thousand of acres in Caithness, much of it situated in the now famous "flow country", has agreed to a request by NIREX, the nuclear waste disposal agency, to investigate the suitability of land at Altnabreac for a deep storage facility.

It is not the job of this magazine to argue the pros and cons of nuclear waste disposal in Scotland or elsewhere, the decision to use land at Altnabreac will be made by others after public consultation, we are concerned only with the effect this decision may have on the railway system.

For those of you who have never visited the area it can only be described as one of the most bleak and remote areas in Britain, easily on a par with the wilds of Rannoch Moor on the West Highland or Druimuachdar Summit on the Highland Main Line.

A general view of Altnabreac Station, the modern building is a private house but the typical Highland Railway Water Tank and Column survive. (PA).

Lochdhu Hotel, now empty but in very good condition stands over the bleak moorland at Altnabreac.

In the foreground is the track which leads to the station situated about half-a-mile beyond the hotel. This last section of track is in much better condition than the first six miles due to upgrading by a private forestry company who have planted all the area in the photograph (PA).

Altnabreac retains its station, although now relegated to the status of a unmanned halt, offering no passenger facilities whatsoever, not even a seat. Once this station served the nearby Lochdhu Hotel, still standing as an empty monument to the great days of Victorian confidence. The tiny community of two or three houses is about to lose its school and much of the area around the station has now been planted with conifers by a private forestry company.

Artist's impression of the deep level disposal vaults at the land-based repository.

Should the area be used for nuclear waste disposal the railway line offers the only sensible method of transporting this waste. Altnabreac is at the end of a rough track almost eight miles long, which itself commences from a minor single track road over six miles long before reaching the A895 trunk road.

Railway Digest Scotland wrote to NIREX to ascertain their position with regard to rail transport and the likely volume of traffic. They considered the presence of a rail connection to be a factor in favour of any specific site (wherever in Britain it is identified). By contrast, the absence of a nearby railhead would be a factor against such a site. However, it is not so substantial a factor as the presence of a suitable hydrogeological environment.

They expect that if all the solid low level and intermediate level radioactive waste they anticipate consigning to a deep facility were to travel by road, in conventional I.S.O. vehicles, then some 100 lorries would arrive at the facility each week.

The national policy is to store these wastes for fifty years, by which time the NIREX facility would be full. High level waste would not be involved as this is owned by British Nuclear Fuels and is stored at their Sellafield site in Cumbria, which is, of course, rail served, and has contributed greatly to the revenue of the Cumbrian Coast Line.

It would seem therefore that if such a facility were to be constructed at Altnabreac it would secure the future of the North Highland Line for the next fifty years and could even influence the building of a rail bridge across the Dornoch Firth.

If only a fraction of the money now being spent on improving the A9 road was available to the railways, perhaps we could even see a rail connection to Dounreay thus diverting this dangerous traffic away from the roads. At the same time a short branch to Scrabster would allow the railways to compete for the high volume of container traffic destined for Orkney.

An artist's impression of a land-based repository.