It may not be the biggest project in Britain, but it’s the biggest thing to happen to Leven in fifty years. The Levenmouth Railway opened to fare-paying passengers on Sunday, 2 June. That may have been two days after the “Spring” deadline, but few people were complaining. The fifty thousand residents of the Leven area community are back on the railway map – officially.

This is nowhere near as ambitious as the East West Rail or HS2 projects. It’s not even one-third of the length of the Borders Railway, but for this economically neglected corner of Fife in Scotland, none of that matters. 0830 on a very sunny Sunday morning marked the culmination of a very long wait for a rail service. The six miles (9.6km) of branch line is every bit a lifeline to the communities of East Fife.

Low-key opening

The Scottish Government’s Cabinet Secretary for Transport, Fiona Hyslop, was on board the first train. “Got my ticket this morning at 8.30 am for the first timetabled train from Leven to Edinburgh to run for over 50 years – a historic moment,” she said on a social media port. “Great to speak to the driver, Neil Rennie.”

However, it seems not everyone was as prepared as the Cabinet Secretary. On the day of opening, the ScotRail website returned enquiries with a message “Sorry, you cannot Check Service for the Leven station on this site. Please refer to National Rail Enquires [sic] for more information.” Redirecting would-be passengers to a misspelt link to a third party may be one way of keeping demand manageable. The opening certainly seems to have been lower-key than other recent openings.

Popular opening at a popular time

There have been concerns that the project could suffer from a problem that has beset previous new lines in Scotland. The business case may have grossly underestimated the demand and popularity of the new railway. When the Borders Railway opened in 2015, connecting Edinburgh with several towns in the county of Midlothian and the Scottish Borders region, trains were so overcrowded that passengers were often denied boarding.

Levenmouth services will begin with an hourly service. ScotRail says that the two-car trains will be strengthened to longer formations, and the service will be upgraded to every thirty minutes once additional rolling stock becomes available. That rolling stock may be cascaded from electrification projects elsewhere in Scotland. However, that has given cause for concern. It sounds ominously similar to the Borders Railway scenario, and the Levenmouth railway directly serves a larger population.

It has been nine years since Scotland last had a new railway and fifty-five years since trains last ran to Leven. The hope is that a summer opening in the holiday season will be a success, not tainted by repeating the mistakes of the past.