Reston: The story of Scotland's newest and quietest train station

That is because a cross-border express is about to fly through - creating a wind so strong it might blow you down. 

The announcements are most often in vain: the platforms are routinely empty. Usually it is just Gerald Collum who hears them.

The 70-year-old lives in the nearest house to the station, which opened two years ago at a price of £20m. 

Recovering at home from a third stroke, Collum has never taken one of the few trains that actually stop at Reston. Instead he counts the cars in its state-of-the art parking lot.

“There are usually 18-20,” he says. “The station is really nice, though.”

Reston Train Station (Image: David Leask/The Herald)

As Collum spoke there were around two dozen vehicles at Reston. A bus - its timetable not displayed for reasons which baffle locals - delivers a few more people to the station. 

There were a dozen car park spaces with state-of-the-art charging points - all empty - and a cycle rack with no bikes. 

Reston - with long platforms for intercity trains and lift towers - is state of the art. It just does not attract many travellers, not, at least, for a mainline stop.

Official statistics from the UK’s rail regulator show that that the station handled 13,190 passengers in the 12 months through March 2023. 

Reston only opened on May 23, 2022, so it was averaging more than 40 people on its platforms a day.

Since then, unofficially, numbers have doubled. TransPennine Express, the main operator at Reston, says it handled 29,000 journeys in the last year. That is nearly 80 a day.

It is is a lot more than a few dozen of Scotland’s tiny stops on Highland lines. 

But this is a £20m station on the East Coast Main Line, or ECML, one of the two strategic north to south arteries of the UK’s railway system. Even its advocates hope for bigger numbers.

The car park and charging stations at Reston Train Station (Image: David Leask/The Herald)

Berwick, the first stop on the same line on the English side of the border, gets more than half a million passengers a year. 

Reston, of course, is a village with around 200 houses and 450 citizens. So why does it have a gold-plated mainline station?

Because of a highly-effective two-decades-long local campaign to reverse the Beeching cuts of 60 years ago - and to provide a service for a wider chunk of the eastern Borders.

Reston used to be where the old Berwickshire railway met the east coast line. Trains ferried cattle to its auction mart (on what is now the new station’s car park and closed as mad cow disease hit in 2001). 

The station - and the local railway - shut in 1964 along with swathes of Britain’s Victorian infrastructure.

At the time Barrie Forrest, now 82 and a one-time foreman at the mart, was so upset he went digging in the rubble of the old station and rescued the pale sky blue station sign.

“I kept it in my shed,” the steam enthusiast explains from his home down the street from Collum. Now the vintage sign is pointedly attached to the new station. 

Forrest, in his home stuffed with rail memorabilia, grins in delight at this. 

Empty bike stations at Reston Train Station (Image: David Leask/The Herald)

He loves trains and he loves Reston (the village reciprocates, without the pensioner’s knowledge the access lane to the station was called Forrest Road).

“I remember as a boy going all the way to Duns on the Berwickshire line with my granny,” he says, always smiling. “I remember the cattle and sheep coming all the way from Ireland, via Glasgow, on the trains to the mart.”

Forrest - stressing that the station is supposed to serve a pretty big catchment area in east Berwickshire - admits numbers in the first year were disappointing. 

He and other locals are well aware how much their station cost. They want it to work.

“It is getting a lot busier now,” Forrest insists. “There was Covid, and driver shortages and strikes in the first year.”

TransPennine Express, a now nationalised UK operator,  stops at Reston, often at slightly strange times. So, twice a day, does LNER.

Forrest is worried about this eccentric timetable. There is, he points out, an evening gap of five hours when there are no trains at all. But he adds: “Our biggest problem is the fare structure.”

Barrie Forrest (Image: David Leask/The Herald)

At Reston’s village post office, cafe and local store, locals agree.

TransPennine - which used to be paid extra by the Scottish Government to stop - does offer online deals. But tickets can be dear: a return to Edinburgh bought a day in advance starts at £23.30. A last minute single can be more.

Compare this to services between Edinburgh and Dunbar, 15 miles up the ECML. Off-peak a return is little more than £12.

Max Eaves, an IT network engineer who used to work for rail companies, reckons it is sometimes £20 cheaper to drive to Dunbar. 

“Reston is a weird station,” he explains. “It is run by ScotRail but not served by Scotrail. The fares on the ECML are set by LNER. Dunbar has its fares set by Scotrail.”

Reston is in Scotland. But it is only 20 minutes from the frontier. Scotrail does not run trains to Berwick, in England (even though Edinburgh is the most popular destination from the long-disputed border town).

Reston is in what Eaves calls a “grey area” where both the UK Department for Transport and Transport Scotland have a say over its services. 

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And the ECML has also sorts of constraints on its capacity, not least free access operators like Lumo speeding through stations like Reston.

“There are just not that many free slots,” says Eaves, who remains worried about the long-term future of services to his village. “They do not have enough capacity.’

Locals see the trains as a lifeline service, which needs to be subsidised in the same way that island ferries are. Places like Eyemouth, St Abbs, Coldingham and Chirnside, they reckon, need connections. That means making sure buses connect with trains. Which they do not always do.

Dawn Inglis, a librarian originally from Newcastle, was told Reston was getting station by Forrest when she first moved to the village. 

Her daughter is in Edinburgh and she thinks she would leave without the train link.  “It’s brilliant,” she says. 

There has long been talk too that the station might encourage development in the village or region. That has not happened yet.

One veteran of Scotland’s railways stresses that projects like Reston need to be judged over decades - not a season or two.

“It’s a 30-year business case,” he says. “And the bar for return in investment for remote or rural areas is going to be lower than for the Central Belt.”

New stations are expensive, averaging at £15m in recent years. They have to build to higher spec - and better disability access rules - than existing ones.  

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Several more are planned under various funding mechanisms.  The veteran railwayman stressed it was for politicians to decide what and where to build. “I might have preferred to improve access at 10 old stations,” he says.

Dumbarton, which has 10 times as many passengers as Reston, does not have lifts. Renfrew and St Andrews, which each have 50 times more people than Reston, do not have stations at all. 

Another anonymous rail source worries politicians are making bad choices.

He cites  a former politician who said “ministers love cutting ribbons on shiney new things”.

He added: “They’re less keen on the boring work of maintaining and upgrading existing assets.

“Rail is not the most cost effective solution for all journeys. Yes, trains are nice. But they're also really, really expensive

“Unless we focus on the things that heavy rail does well - connect centres of urban density over long distance - we're not going to make our rail network affordable to taxpayers.”

Reston, he argues, was a “nice to have”. But he added:  “None of this is driven by business case or genuine appraisal of demand - it's based on which campaigners make the most noise and get noticed by politicians.

“There are places with high demand but no station.”

John Lamont is the MP for Reston and its part of the Borders. 

The Tory championed the new station and, like locals, believes it is a “lifeline”. 

He admits there were initial “challenges” in service delivery but adds: “I don’t agree with people who say this was bad value for money. The new station will open up the eastern borders - for locals and for people who want to visit this beautiful part of the country.”

TransPennine Express also talks up the station. What it called an “innovating funding agreement” - an extra subsidy - from Transport Scotland ended in June. But it intends to keep stopping at Reston.

This Government has improved connectivity, increased the number of stations and trains and is investing unprecedented amounts in the rail network (Image: PA)

A spokeswoman said: “These services now firmly part of the schedule of services specified and funded in the usual way. 

“These services are very popular with the customers and the communities they serve, and all parties look forward to their continued growth.”

Transport Scotland stressed Reston was part of a much bigger spend on developing railways. 

A spokeswoman says:  “This Government has improved connectivity, increased the number of stations and trains and is investing unprecedented amounts in the rail network. In financial year 2024-25, total funding for the rail sector in Scotland will be £1.6 billion.

“Our rail enhancement programme continues to invest in new projects across the rail network in Scotland.  Most recently, it has delivered new stations at Inverness Airport, Reston, East Linton, Leven and Cameron Bridge. The Levenmouth Rail link project, over £116m of Scottish Government’s investment, has reconnected the Levenmouth area to Scotland by rail from June this year

“The Glasgow - Barrhead electrification project, a £63.3m investment, finalised in December 2023 with first electric trains on the route from 11 December 2023, as part of the Scottish Government commitment to decarbonise passenger services across Scotland's Railway.”

But how do we know whether Reston - or any of the other projects - were value for money? “It is currently too soon after opening to conduct an evaluation of the impacts,” says a Transport Scotland source.