What to make of the new Borders railway?

At the Cloudhouse Cafe, owner Gemma Blacker says the village is already reaping the rewards of one of the biggest civil engineering projects in Scotland for a century: four families have moved in and more are on the way. It is not unusual to see customers poring over a schedule, she says.

Such an air of celebration is to be expected; under the original plans, Stow, with its kirk and packhorse bridge, was not supposed to have a station, but its residents fought a grassroots campaign and won. A second campaign saved the old station building from demolition. Now villagers hope it will be turned into a small museum or cycle hire shop, something to entice tourists to step off the train and spend some time there.

Bill Jamieson was one of the founding members of the Stow Station Supporters Group. On Wednesday, he will join the Queen and other luminaries at the railway’s formal launch. Invited guests will travel the length of the 35-mile route, from Edinburgh through Midlothian to Tweedbank on a steam service hauled by the Union of South Africa before having lunch at Abbotsford, the home of Sir Walter Scott.

Jamieson is delighted part of the old Waverley line – axed in the wake of the Beeching report despite protests in 1969 – has been brought back to life. But his enthusiasm is dampened by the crude, urban design of the station they’ve secured. The new structure – all concrete slabs and painted metal – looks as if it has been lifted en masse from the Central Belt and plonked down in this rolling green landscape. Jamieson shakes his head at its starkness and says that with a little more effort, the contractors could have built something more in harmony with the bucolic setting. “It’s in the Borders, but it’s not really of the Borders,” he says.

Today, as the new railway opens to paying passengers for the first time, it is heaving with train-lovers. But as I travelled round towns on the old Waverley line, I encountered much ambivalence. There were some who dismissed the £350 million project as a white elephant; but even those who had faith in it – who believed it could bring houses, investment and tourism into the region – spoke of limited vision and missed opportunities.

The decision to stop at Tweedbank as opposed to Carlisle or Hawick, or even Melrose, the decision to make so much of the route single track and the ugliness of some of the structures were all held up as evidence of a lack of vision and a failure to capitalise on an investment.

Take Kim Elliot, who lives in Hawick. He is the son of Madge Elliot, the indomitable 87-year-old who led the campaign against closure in 1969 and has been at the heart of efforts to bring it back. Elliot has always been obsessed with the railway; as a child he used to stand on the embankment opposite his primary school and watch freight trains – a steam locomotive at either end – struggling to make it up the hill. Though he no longer train-spots, he still likes to sit on platforms absorbing the hustle and bustle. Elliot was 11 when the Waverley route shut; devastated, he accompanied his mother on the trip to hand a petition into 10 Downing Street.

Today, he and fellow Downing Street petitioner Ian Bell are in the Hawick and District Railway Society rummaging through old photographs. Behind them is a model railway which features the old Waverley line at Whitrope and a replica Class 45 D60 Lytham St Annes locomotive which pulled the last train.

Elliot is a mass of competing emotions over the reopening; 45 years hasn’t healed the bitterness he feels over the way the old line was axed, but he and Bell both gush about the trip from Tweedbank to Newcraighall they enjoyed earlier in the year. “The scenery is brilliant and it’s so fast,” they say, pretty much in unison. “It only takes 12 minutes to go from Tweedbank to Stow. And it’s smooth. The only time you feel anything is when you go over the points as you move from double to single track – other than that you just glide.”