Kilmarnock & Troon Railway

The Kilmarnock and Troon Railway was the first railway in Scotland authorised by Act of Parliament, opened on 6 July 1812 to carry coal from the Duke of Portland's pits at Kilmarnock to the harbour at Troon on the Ayrshire coast — a distance of 9¾ miles through the flat agricultural land between the inland town and the sea. It was also the first railway in Scotland on which steam haulage was demonstrated, when a George Stephenson Killingworth-built locomotive ran trial trips on the line in 1816, though regular working remained horse-drawn until the railway was comprehensively rebuilt as a conventional steam railway in 1846.

The original Kilmarnock and Troon was a plateway — using L-section iron rails on which flanged wagon wheels could run — at a gauge of 4 ft, reflecting the early railway engineering practice of the period before standard gauge had been universally established. The line's commercial purpose was straightforward: reducing the cost of transporting Ayrshire coal from pit to port compared with the horse-drawn road haulage that had previously served the trade. When Glasgow and South Western Railway absorbed the rebuilt line in 1899, the route became part of the main Ayrshire coast railway system, and the alignment between Kilmarnock and Troon continues in use today on the Glasgow–Stranraer route — one of the oldest continuously-used railway routes in Scotland.