The original Deeside Railway opened in stages between 1853 and 1866, threading west from Aberdeen up the valley of the River Dee — past Banchory, past Aboyne, past Ballater. For most of its working life it carried freight, timber, salmon, and tourists. For all of its working life, it occasionally carried royalty. Queen Victoria, who had fallen in love with Balmoral, used the line to travel between London and her Highland retreat. Edward VII, George V, and George VI followed her. The line that ran through the trees beside the Dee was, for nearly a century, the back-door entrance to the royal estate.
In 1963, Dr Richard Beeching published a report for British Railways arguing that more than a third of the network was unprofitable and should be closed. The Deeside Railway was on the list. Passenger services from Aberdeen to Ballater ended in 1966, and freight followed soon after. The rails were lifted. The stations became houses or fell into ruin. The valley that had once heard the whistle of the royal train fell quiet. This was the fate of a great many British country lines in the 1960s and 1970s — dismantled in the name of efficiency, lamented immediately afterwards, and then in some places, slowly, lovingly, brought back to a fraction of their former life by volunteer preservation societies.
The Royal Deeside Railway Preservation Society was formed in 1996, with the aim of restoring the stretch between Banchory and Milton of Crathes. The work was — and still is — done largely by volunteers. Milton of Crathes station has a single platform, two tracks forming a locomotive run-round loop, a small shop, a museum, and a ticket office. It is the kind of operation that runs on volunteer Saturdays and donated paint, that lives or dies on the steady flow of visitors paying a few pounds to ride a vintage carriage along a mile of restored line. The headline locomotive is 'Bon Accord,' an Andrew Barclay 0-4-0ST saddle tank that once worked at the Aberdeen Gas Works. Another, 'Salmon,' a 0-6-0ST also from Andrew Barclay, sits awaiting an expensive boiler overhaul. British Rail Class 03 diesel shunters provide the working day-to-day power, hauling Mark 2 coaches in BR Crimson and Cream livery — a colour scheme deliberately chosen to evoke the 1950s and 1960s, the last decades when this line was alive.
Among the railway's quirkier holdings is a British Rail BEMU — Battery Electric Multiple Unit. Originally a diesel railcar, it was converted to battery power and operated on the Deeside Railway between 1958 and 1966 as part of a British Rail experiment to find cheaper rural traction. The same line that hosted Queen Victoria's special train also hosted one of the world's earliest battery-electric passenger trains. The BEMU still exists at Milton of Crathes. Its electrical system needs a complete overhaul before it can run under its own power again, but it is sometimes coupled into trains as a passenger coach, offering an alternative to the Mark 2 carriages. Future passengers who walk down its central aisle are walking through railway history twice over — Victorian heritage line, mid-twentieth-century battery experiment, twenty-first century preservation.
The current ambition is to extend running services to Riverside Halt, a new station partway along the line towards Banchory. A new loop line is under construction there along with siding spaces for stock. From Riverside Halt, passengers will be able to walk back along the trackbed to Milton of Crathes or onward along the Deeside Way towards Banchory itself. Progress has been hampered — COVID delays, bridge issues, the continuing problem that the Deeside Way pedestrian and cycle path still uses the Bridge of Bennie, which means the railway cannot yet extend its own track across it. The estimated cost of finishing the extension to Banchory has been put at around £250,000. It is the kind of figure that, in volunteer railway preservation, gets raised one bake sale at a time.
Milton of Crathes lies at approximately 57.056°N, 2.429°W, on the north bank of the River Dee about 17 nautical miles west of Aberdeen. Recommended viewing altitude is 2,500–4,000 feet AGL. The Dee valley is a clear linear landmark, with the heritage station visible against the riverbank near Crathes Castle. EGPD (Aberdeen International) is the controlling airfield to the east. Royal Deeside continues upstream towards Balmoral (about 35 nm west) and the Cairngorms beyond. Weather is generally fine in the valley itself, though Highland cloud often caps the higher ground to the north and south.