History

The ‘Puggy Line’ is another name for a ‘narrow guage’ railway line. Puggy is the name given to the small steam engines on this type of railway.

During WW1 a ‘Puggy Line’ railway was used to extract timber from Abernethy Forest. Alastair McCook; Nethy Bridge, remembers seeing an abandoned engine near the Y junction along the Tulloch road; possibly around 1930. This may have been a Thomas Green 0-4-0 (Basil Dunlop, 1995).

Explore Abernethy Walk.  The Puggy Line trail is one of the Explore Abernethy Way Marked trails in Nethy Bridge. The walk goes through Dell Woods NNR and passes closely to the route of the ‘Puggy Line’.  Locally this walk has been called the two bridges (crossing two burns).

Location

Puggy line near the Tulloch road. You can clearly see banks either side of the line. In Abernethy the line was thought to be about five miles long. The line met the main GNS railway by the bridge at NH990209, the line then crosses east of Mondhuie and runs almost parallel to the Tulloch Road. After the public road splits (approx NH995188)the railway line leads onto a flat area (Ryduack). There was a sidings and a sawmill here. There may have been a camp here too. From here there were two narrow guage lines which brought timber to Ryduack. One runs west up to Tore hill. The other would have run east across the Duack Burn across the forest to sidings at the start of Thompson’s Brae (Basil Dunlop, 1995. Puggy line near Mondu Evidence of the Puggy Line near Tore Hill. Puggy line near the Tulloch Road. Here it has been built up.

Other references

Lindsay Buchanan, Basil Dunlop, 1995, The Logging Railways of Strathspey.