The Arbroath and Forfar Railway (A&FR) was a railway that connected Forfar with the port town of Arbroath, in Scotland. It opened in 1838–1839 and it was successful in making an operating profit, but it was always desperately short of capital. It used the track gauge of . When the Aberdeen Railway was authorised in 1845, it leased the Arbroath and Forfar line to form part of its main line connecting Forfar and Aberdeen; it opened in 1848. The Aberdeen Railway was to be a standard gauge line and the A&FR had to alter its track gauge. The A&FR line formed part of the main line from Stirling to Aberdeen, and when the North British Railway started running to Aberdeen in 1881, their trains too ran over a very short section of the A&FR. Nearly all of the A&FR line was closed in 1967 when the former North British Railway route was selected as the only route to Aberdeen, and the short section immediately north of Arbroath is the only section of the A&FR still in use. History Conception and authorisation In the early years of the nineteenth century there was an explosion in the volume of textile production in Forfarshire as industrialisation was introduced. The transport of raw materials and lime for agricultural purposes to inland towns, and of the finished products to market, were hampered by poor transport facilities. In 1817 the magistrates of Arbroath considered the construction of a canal to Forfar, but the proposal was not adopted. As the need for improved transport links became more pressing, the idea of a railway was proposed. In 1826 Stevenson and Blackadder surveyed a railway route; they planned an inclined plane to descend into Arbroath; the final approach to the harbour was to have been through the streets. This scheme too did not proceed, but it was revived in 1824, by which time a waggonway was a viable alternative; Robert Stevenson supervised the survey. The route would have involved a rope-worked inclined plane to descend to Arbroath Harbour; it too was not progressed. In 1835 a number of prominent citizens of Arbroath commissioned a review of possible routes for a railway, examining the waggonway proposal; technology had now proceeded to the point where a railway was the natural transport medium. The Edinburgh firm of railway engineers Grainger and Miller had been commissioned to carry out the review, and they