in common with the opening of the Esk Valle Railway. The North British under Kippendavie The Company now sought to grow revenues on the existing network. A rapprochement was reached with the Caledonian Railway—Kippendavie came from that railway's Board—and commitments to the City of Glasgow Union Railway were eased. (At one time there had been thoughts of the NBR using a considerably expanded terminus on the line in alliance with the Glasgow and South Western Railway, but the cost would have been huge and it was not now possible to proceed. The Shareholders' Meeting of 12 September 1867 was told that arrangements had been made to deal with the £1,875,625 () of debt already identified; but the company are under obligations to construct new lines, involving a further amount of £2,600,000. It s essential to limit this liability... but [the Directors] do not consider an indiscriminate abandonment of works to be desirable. Accordingly provision is made in the Finance Act for constituting certain of the unexpected works into separate undertakings... It is to local parties that the Directors look for subscriptions to construct branch lines, required for the accommodation of particular districts, so that it will in a great measure rest with the local interests, whether or not such works shall be immediately proceeded with. Revenue sharing agreement with the Caledonian Railway Building on the improved relations with the Caledonian, Kippendavie reached a revenue sharing arrangement with that company on 16 January 1868; the agreement included refrain from opposing time extension on NBR projects that had been delayed by the financial turmoil. By 1869, the Caledonian and the NBR were once again at loggerheads; the main issue now was the Waverley Route, and the proportion of traffic attributable to it. It emerged that the Caledonian had secretly concluded a pact with the London and North Western Railway in 1867; the arrangement excluded the North British from nearly all goods traffic, and its revelation damaged good feeling: indeed the Caledonian were doing what they could to make the Waverley Route the source of the difficulties. By late 1869 the revenue sharing agreement was a dead letter. Financial improvement and branch lines From 22 May 1868, the new connection to the former Edinburgh Leith and Granton Railway via Piershill was opened; this gave a more modern, but more circuitous, approach to Granton, still in use for passenger traffic by ferry to Fife,