When mothers grow old and widowed and perhaps infirm, their children often take them out for a tour in the car. Twenty years ago I took mine to look at a few of her favourite places in the Scottish borders, and on the way home we somehow, though it was obviously my doing, drove into the site of what had once been a small railway junction called Leadburn. Track and trains had gone long ago; only what you might call the stationary fundamentals remained. Two high banks faced with brick and stone marked the platforms. The rest was trees and grass.

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We looked across at the Pentland hills, sunlit on the northern horizon, and contemplated the closer scene. “We’ve lost so much,” my mother said, though this was a general rather than a particular lament. Leadburn junction hadn’t meant much to her – Dad and she must have seen it from the train on one of their Saturday jaunts, in this case to Peebles (a pretty little town of which never a bad word was spoken). In fact, Leadburn hadn’t meant much to anyone. As a place, it had never amounted to more than a crossroads and an inn situated high on a watershed; “the most villainous bleak place that I have ever seen,” says the narrator in a John Buchan adventure, “if there be a more forsaken countryside on Earth, I do not know it.” As for its role as a railway junction, this had ended in 1933 with the closure of the branch line to Dolphinton, another thinly populated settlement in these forsaken lowland moors.

Shorn of its branch, the station lingered on as a wayside halt serving the innkeeper and a few local farmers until it too closed in 1955. The last train ran over the whole 30-mile length of the Peebles line seven years later, which meant that in February 1962 Peeblesshire became the first county in mainland Scotland to be outside the reach of a passenger train. Richard Beeching didn’t publish the report that recommended savage cuts to the system for another year. With its tendency to personalise and dramatise, popular history likes to see him as the railway’s nemesis, with Margaret Thatcher doing the same for manufacturing 20 years later. But, of course, the trains and the factories, once more thickly present in Britain than anywhere else in the world, had begun their decline long before. When my mother said that we’d lost so much, that’s what she meant – the steady elimination of the artefacts and ways of living that had characterised the earlier life of someone born in 1907.

Some of this could hardly be regretted; who could feel sad that so much hardship and disease had disappeared? Some of it should never have happened in the first place; Dolphinton, for example, was as obscure a place as ever reached by a British railway – only a couple of hundred people lived there – and yet, thanks to a fierce and expensive rivalry between Victorian railway companies, it had two stations rather than the none its trade deserved.

Still, inside my family and many others, the feeling of loss persisted, despite the material gains of the postwar age. Like others of my generation, I became aware early on that despite our unprecedented good health and prosperity, we were in other respects headed down a road of great dwindling. Parental memories encouraged the tendency – a father and mother born into the Edwardian age were always exchanging and contesting their versions of the past – but what later proved to be the larger burden were the boyhood enthusiasms that flourished in the 1950s and made so many of us expert classifiers and cataloguers of railway locomotives and steamships. The inspirers of these interests ranged from friends and elder brothers to the kind of pipe-smoking father that used to appear in the advertisements for Hornby model trains (looking on approvingly as one of his boys – sons, we hope – switched the points). But they played a cruel trick, because within 20 years, most of our love objects had been swept away by technological progress: Atlantic liners, steam-hauled expresses, cross-country lines and country junctions, all broken up, sometimes prematurely, by the demolisher’s hammer and the blowtorch. We might as well have stayed at home and boned up on the dodo.

These disappearances at first promoted nostalgia and then a little resistance. In 1962, the last train to Peebles had been greeted by a passive group of railway hobbyists and townspeople who were aware that some kind of history was being made; in 1969, it was angry crowds who witnessed the closure of the 100-mile mainline from Edinburgh to Carlisle, the Waverley line, which both ends of the Peebles loop had joined. But it seemed that nothing could be done. The “modernisation” of the 1960s turned out to be a gentle change compared to the deindustrialisation that began in the 1980s, and by the 2000s had closed nearly every locomotive works and merchant shipbuilder in the country. The people who, for reasons of temperament or belief, cared about these developments learned to disbelieve politicians’ promises to “rebalance” the economy, and to look away when worse news followed bad: to proof themselves against the feeling that there was no end to the things we could go on losing.

But this summer – to my mind at least – there have been two remarkable developments that go against the recent social and economic grain, and can be read as hopeful signs of a small renaissance. The first is the Borders Railway, the 30 miles of the old Waverley route from Edinburgh to near Melrose that the Queen opened (or rather re-opened) on Wednesday. The second, less noticed outside Scotland, is that the new owners of Ferguson’s shipyard in Port Glasgow have won orders for two big ferries – the beginnings of an ambitious expansion that could increase the workforce from 150 to more than 1,000, and secure a future for merchant shipbuilding not just in Scotland but in Britain.

I write from a town in western Scotland, which has had as poor a summer as anyone can remember: cold, wet and windy. The results range from the mildly disappointing to the financially critical. The bramble-picker, struggling in the undergrowth with her basket and fetching-stick, can find only berries that are small, hard and green. The arable farmer inspects his flooded fields and wonders when and if he can harvest his barley – and how much profit will come to him when world cereal prices are so low. There is a lot of bad news – from the North Sea, where half the oil fields may close within the next five years, and from salmon farms overwhelmed by jellyfish. In this context, the celebrations in Galashiels and Port Glasgow stand out like starbursts.

There are, of course, “business-case” justifications for the railway: that it will revive the economy of the old Border towns, extend Edinburgh house prices southward, and so on. Those reasons alone, however, hardly explain the level of interest the new-old line has excited. Nor, in other places, would winning the contract to build two humble ferries cause an equal jubilation. Something else is at work here, some large historical longing: Mum, sitting in the car that day at a vanished railway junction, would have shared it.