A new station is taking shape. Could it be a model for the future?

But not for much longer, I’m pleased to say, because this week Network Rail has released pictures of the work that’s being done to restore Leven station. It’s part of a plan to reopen about 12 miles of the Fife coastal line and is due to be completed next year. Some 1800 tonnes of stone have been piled into the foundations and you can see now the future shape of the platforms.

This is exciting stuff, and not just for train geeks like me. It means that – as also happened with Reston in the Borders recently – a community that was cut free of the railway will suddenly be reconnected with all the positive consequences that come from that. I remember the railway historian Tim Dunn putting it to me this way: those two strips of steel matter, and once you sever them, communities effectively float loose and have to rely on buses that can deviate from their routes or never come at all. From next year, Leven will be cut loose no more.

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Quite apart from the power of that reconnection, physical and emotional, there are other serious lessons to be learned from the re-emergence of the Fife coastal route. First of all, it’s important to be fair to Beeching, who’s always portrayed as the big bad axeman: the truth is by the 60s much of the British network, including the Fife route, was massively under-used and the system had to be rationalised.

But the fact that we are, step by step, reopening some of the stations Beeching put his pen through is also a sign that another part of theory that drove some of those cuts was wrong. The idea then was that the car would effectively replace the train – the car was the future – but anyone who’s ever been stuck on the M8 or anyone who’s worried about climate change will know that’s not the case.

The good news is that what’s happening at Leven can also be a model for the future. The HS2 plan for London and the North of England proves new large-scale infrastructure projects can be massive problematic money-pits (or at least they can be in this country) but the same doesn’t apply to the stations that could be opened: many of them still lie on lines that are in use or could be revived without building something entirely new from scratch.

We’re talking about quite a long list of stations here. In fact, Railfuture Scotland, the independent group that represents passengers, did an excellent study looking at all the stations and lines that could be reopened across the country and reported that there were 50 that were seriously viable. That’s nowhere near the 2000 stations and halts that disappeared in the 60s, but it’s a start.

It's also tempting to imagine some of those stations back up and running and how it would affect us all. Glasgow Cross on the Trongate for example, which was shut in 1964: that would seem like a no-brainer. Gorgie and Morningside in Edinburgh should also be high on the list, and another obvious candidate would be more stations on the Ayrshire line to Dumfries, where the railway could help the area’s continuing regeneration.

None of this is going to happen right away but the fact that 1800 tonnes of stone has already been poured into the foundations of the new platforms at Leven shows it can be done. In 12 months’ time, some of those Scots who took the train up the Fife coastal line for their holidays in the 40s and 50s will be able to do part of the journey again. That’s powerful – a part of Scotland that we thought was gone forever is coming back to life. But it’s also hopeful. From now on, this could be the way we do things.