At 7:20 pm on 21 October 1991, a Dundee bound Aberdeen–LondonIntercity express destroyed two out of the four gates of the level crossing. The fifty passengers on board and five people in a passing car were fortunate to avoid collision when the train passed through the crossing at around 80 miles per hour.[7] The gates had not been closed before the train passed the level crossing. Dundee District Council (now defunct) had previously postponed planning permission to modernise the gates.[citation needed]
Facilities
The station seen in 2014
The station is unstaffed, with benches and help points available on both platforms, plus a payphone and cycle racks on platform 1, although a shelter is available on platform 2. Step-free access is available to both platforms from the main road, but both platforms are also joined via the subway.[8] As there are no facilities to purchase tickets, passengers must buy one in advance, or from the guard on the train.
Passenger volume
In recent years, passenger usage has grown phenomenally, from under 10,000 in 2011–12 to over 90,000 in 2019–20, including a 24,000 rise between 2018–19 and 2019–20. 15 years earlier, usage hovered around 5,000 passengers per year.[9]
The statistics cover twelve month periods that start in April.
Services
Service frequencies at the station have varied significantly over the years - prior to 1990, there were regular local trains to Arbroath and Dundee or Perth throughout the day along with a small number of longer-distance workings. For the next twenty years, only a handful of trains (4 per day each way on average) stopped here, but since then there has a gradual increase in provision following a campaign by the local authority & rail user groups (for example, eight additional stops were added in December 2011).[10]
As of May 2023, on weekdays and Saturdays there is an hourly service in each direction, to Dundee westbound (with one extended to Glasgow and one to Perth), and eastbound to Arbroath (with one extended to Aberdeen, one to Inverurie and one to Inverness). On Sundays, there are only 3 northbound services to Aberdeen and 4 southbound services: two to Edinburgh, one to Glasgow Queen Street and one to Perth.[11]
^Bridge, Mike, ed. (2017). TRACKatlas of Mainland Britain: A Comprehensive Geographic Atlas Showing the Rail Network of Great Britain (3rd ed.). Sheffield: Platform 5 Publishing Ltd. p. 92. ISBN978-1909431-26-3.
