Closed Paths

The railroad line from Dollar to the nearby village of Tillicoultry was opened in 1869. It was told that a popular local character Peter Dudgeon’s impressive announcement Do-lar! carried all the way up to the Dollar Hill located 1,5 kilometres away from the station. The passenger traffic was discontinued in 1964 and the railway foundations turned in the pathway, at the moment being temporarily closed because of the improvement works. Here is Mike Jodeluk’s wonderful recording and comments on Dollar Railway track from the 1960s (with the courtesy of the Dollar Museum).



The discontinuation of the railway inevitably changed the soundscape of the rail yard: the foreground sounds of the signal box informing about the arriving train, the doors of the carriages slamming, the station master giving instructions, and the guard blowing his whistle were all replaced on one hand by nature sounds, on the other by sounds connected to contemporary way of living. The April soundscape of the old platform is today composed of the various birds in the middleground, passing airplane in the background and the humming garden trimmer/electric lawn mower in the foreground.

Heikki Uimonen