Architectural Ironwork at Aviemore Station, ca.1898

This is a photograph of the cast-iron columns supporting the platform buildings at Aviemore Station in the Scottish Highlands. Each column is topped with a cast iron capital decorated with scrolling volutes and Corinthian-style foliage.  The roof’s supporting spandrels contain wheel decorations (roundels) and inserts of typically Victorian-style scrolling stems.  Cast iron was a defining material in the architecture of Britain’s railways where it was used to build the essential infrastructure of footbridges and engine sheds, but also, as here, to give an ornamental flourish to otherwise basic station structures.   Victorian design borrowed from a range of historicist, oriental and floral styles so cast-iron’s strength and adaptability made it the perfect material for decorating street and public architecture.

Aviemore was originally built for the Inverness and Perth Junction Railway in 1863, but was updated at the end of the century when the line was extended through Carrbridge. It is the largest station, except for Inverness, on the Highland Line. Aviemore’s engineer William Roberts worked on six buildings for the Highland Railway including the remodelling of Aviemore in 1898. His other stations include Brora, Newtonmore and Kingussie, the latter in particular shares stylistic characteristics with the platform buildings seen in this photograph.

Constructed of a mixture of local stone and imported materials, the stations on the Highland Railway were built with a combination of Gothic and neoclassical style features.  Neoclassical style details can be seen on these columns and capitals, but gothic-style wood and glass screens to protect passengers from inclement weather were also a feature of the platforms at Aviemore, Kingussie and Grantown. Tourism was a key incentive behind investment in the Carrbridge extension and station comforts were indicative of a station’s economic importance on the railway route to the Highlands.

Scotland’s railways were built with the combined skills of artisans and engineers who worked for contractors tasked with bringing together the skilled workman needed to build each line’s various structures and buildings. A photograph of Aviemore during remodelling shows the men employed by James Robertson of Forres, including carpenters or joiners. Aviemore’s nearby locomotive shed was constructed by Inverness masons, William Alexander & Co, using steel girders and ironwork made at the Rose Street Foundry.  The foundry previously made agricultural implements but prospered in the wave of late nineteenth century railway building moving into new premises in Inverness in1893. 

The updating of railways at the end of the century mobilised artisan skills in the building trades and also supported the subsidiary large-scale industries of stone quarrying and coal-mining.