It’s been 34 years since Jane Ann Liston began her fight for a St Andrews train station – and her resolve hasn’t faded.
Jane Ann has been campaigning to create a rail link to the university town since 1989.
While studying in St Andrews – for a second time – it became obvious to the then 33-year-old Jane Ann that a train station was a no-brainer.
And though much has changed since the 80s, Jane Ann believes the need for a railway link has outlasted leg warmers.
But how has she kept going through a series of doors closing in her face, unpaid bills and sexism?
If you want a job done right…
In the 1970s, Jane Ann was studying for her first degree at St Andrews.
“I had just been here for a couple of months and had some schoolfriends visiting from Edinburgh,” she explained.
“One of them asked for a railway ticket to St Andrews in 1975.
“I had to say, ‘sorry, you don’t get a railway ticket to St Andrews’. She couldn’t believe it.”
One of the reasons Jane Ann learned to drive and got a car was because of the difficulty involved in getting to St Andrews, and the “faffing around” required at Leuchars. Nowadays she travels mostly by bike.
“When I was back as a student in ’85 I thought, it’s really silly that St Andrews doesn’t have a railway line. Someone should be campaigning for this.”
“I kept thinking this, and I kept thinking this… and then I thought ‘to hang with it’.
“It’s like the Bible says: ‘Here am I, send me!’
“I realised I was going to have to do this myself.
“It was just shortly after graduating with my second degree in 1989 that, with one or two other people, I started putting things together.
“The campaign was launched at the community council meeting on September 4 1989.
“That was it. And immediately, people started telling me how difficult it would be.”
‘It would be daft to give up’
Jane Ann has heard “no” many times since that day in 1989.
From a funding refusal in 2019 and plenty local naysayers over the years, she has remained determined throughout.
The latest delay for campaign group StARLink was an unpaid bill which stalled their progress last October.
But she remains as motivated as ever.
“It would be daft to give up,” Jane Ann said, “because there’s still a problem.
“Climate change is not going to go away, and the tourism industry in St Andrews is not going to go away – we hope.
“The university isn’t going anywhere either.
The justification for having a St Andrews railway hasn’t lessened since 1989, if anything it has increased.”
Jane Ann Liston, StARLink convenor and rail campaigner
“There are always going to be people wanting to come to St Andrews, so we have got to find a sustainable way of getting them here.
“Playing the Old Course over Zoom loses something, doesn’t it?
“The justification for having a St Andrews railway hasn’t lessened since 1989, if anything it has increased.
“[I’ve got] a flat head from banging it against the wall.”
Not the pipe dream of a ‘mad woman’
A feature from the 1980s which Jane Ann still has to endure today is sexism.
Jane Ann refuses to be relegated to a corner after the thirty some years she has spent working on the campaign.
She suspects there is a “streak of misogyny” present, perhaps unconsciously, when it comes to her involvement in the campaign.
Many, she says, do not take the campaign seriously.
“I think it has been written off as a mad woman’s idea,” Jane Ann admitted.
But not everyone has that view.
Jane Ann’s decades of tireless campaigning means she was recently recognised with a Railfuture Campaigner of the Year award during a presentation in Holyrood.
“It’s very nice to be recognised,” she said, “it means someone has been paying attention.
“It gives the attempts to expand the rail network more credibility.”
Conversation