Hunterston Terminal
port in North Ayrshire, Scotland, UK
Hunterston Terminal, in North Ayrshire, Scotland, was an iron ore and coal-handling port located at Fairlie on the Firth of Clyde, operated by Clydeport which was taken over by The Peel Group in 2003. It lies south of Fairlie, adjacent to Hunterston estate, site of Hunterston Castle, and its jetty projects out approximately 1 mile (1.6 km), about midway into the channel between the mainland and the island of Great Cumbrae.
The port, completed in 1979, was originally called Hunterston Ore Terminal and was built to handle iron ore for British Steel Corporation's Ravenscraig steelworks. Existing facilities at General Terminus Quay on the upper River Clyde were unsuitable for increasingly large vessels. Hunterston, with its one-mile-long (1.6 km) jetty, was able to handle modern ships of any size, but was closed in 2016 and the site cleared in 2019.
History
The new port at Hunterston replaced facilities at General Terminus Quay (now Springfield Quay), on the River Clyde, near the centre of Glasgow. These facilities had been designed in the early 1950s to allow the simultaneous unloading of two large ships carrying bulk iron ore. The ships were designed to carry 12,000 tons (12,200 tonnes) of iron ore. Iron ore was to be transported, in railway waggons, via the General Terminus and Glasgow Harbour Railway, from the General Terminus Quay to the new Ravenscraig steelworks which opened in the late 1950s.
Facilities at Hunterston Terminal
At Hunterston Terminal, an overhead conveyor linked to two gantry cranes carried ore or coal to a railhead on the Ayrshire Coast Line railway.
“Hunterston Terminal” enters the record as port in North Ayrshire, Scotland, UK. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Hunterston, Terminal and port can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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This entry incorporates text from “Hunterston Terminal” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.