South Queensferry Layover: Forth Bridges

Three bridges cross the Firth of Forth side by side at South Queensferry, ten miles west of Edinburgh, and the town beneath them is sixteen minutes by train from Edinburgh Waverley to Dalmeny station, with a cobbled High Street and a pier directly under the 1890 rail bridge.

The train from Waverley takes sixteen minutes

Dalmeny is the station for South Queensferry, on the Fife Circle line, sitting just south of the rail bridge itself. Four trains an hour run each way Monday to Saturday, two on Sundays, and the ride from Waverley is sixteen minutes with a stop at Haymarket on the way. There is no local bus out to the town from the airport, so a flight arrival goes in to the city first and back out by rail, which is why this works better on four hours than on two.

Getting from the station down to the water is the part nobody warns you about. The town sits on the shore and the station sits well above it, and the direct route finishes on Jacob’s Ladder, a flight of steep stone steps that comes out behind the Hawes Inn. Fifteen minutes down, longer back up, and no version of it that a wheeled suitcase enjoys.

The red cantilevers of the Forth Bridge

Hawes Pier puts you directly underneath it. The Forth Bridge opened in 1890 to a design by John Fowler and Benjamin Baker, and it is a cantilever structure rather than a suspension or arch one: three enormous steel diamonds standing on granite piers, with the track threaded between them a mile and a half across the water. It took 53,000 tonnes of steel and something like 6.5 million rivets, and it was inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2015.

“Painting the Forth Bridge” became shorthand for a job that never ends, because for a century it more or less was one. That stopped in 2011, at the end of a ten-year repaint in a glass-flake epoxy borrowed from the offshore oil industry, rated to hold for at least twenty years, which quietly retired the idiom.

Boats leave from the pier through the season for a run under all three bridges and out past Inchcolm island’s medieval abbey, with seals usually somewhere on the way; the sightseeing cruise is worth booking before you travel out, since sailings are weather-dependent and there is no point making the trip to find the pier shut.

Queensferry’s cobbled High Street and the Hawes Inn

The town is one long street on the shore, on setts, with a second row of houses on a raised terrace above it reached by stairs. It is called Queensferry because Queen Margaret of Scotland put a ferry across the Forth here in the eleventh century to carry pilgrims towards Dunfermline and St Andrews, and the crossing kept running under that name until the road bridge made it redundant in 1964.

At the eastern end, beside the pier, is the Hawes Inn. Robert Louis Stevenson stayed in room 13 in 1886 and worked out the shape of Kidnapped there, and the inn shows up in the book as the place where Davie Balfour is taken aboard. It is a pub now, and it is the obvious place to end up if the weather turns.

The footpath across the Forth Road Bridge

The second bridge, twenty minutes west along the shore, is the Forth Road Bridge of 1964, a suspension bridge that carried all the vehicle traffic between Edinburgh and Fife for half a century and was the longest suspension bridge outside the United States when it opened. It still has a public footpath along its east side, open in all but winds over 50mph, and walking out onto it gives you the rail bridge on one side and the newest crossing on the other from the middle of the firth.

The third one, the Queensferry Crossing, opened in 2017 and took the motorway traffic off the old bridge. It is cable-stayed rather than suspended, which is why its three towers are so much thinner, and it has no footpath at all: this is a bridge you look at rather than cross.

Allow two hours here plus the round trip. On a shorter stop this is the wrong side of the city to be on, and the Edinburgh itinerary this belongs to keeps everything inside a fifteen-minute walk of Waverley instead.

Nothing runs from here straight out to Edinburgh Airport

The route back is the same train in to Waverley or Haymarket, sixteen minutes, then the Airlink 100 bus, £6 single and about 30 minutes, on from there. There is no more direct way to close the loop.

Head back in for your suitcase before that final run out, and build both legs into your timing rather than just the ride itself: missing the connection at Waverley costs more than a slow walk down to the pier ever would.