Trains across Yorkshire on a long weekend

Despite its plethora of attractions, including its stunning Victorian Quarter, it wasn’t seeing the city itself which led to me spending four nights in Leeds recently. No I’d chosen the Park Plaza hotel because it was opposite Leeds City station.

Day One - England's Greatest Railway Journey

“A day return to Appleby, that’s £22 please love” made me pause, I didn’t think it was that far from Leeds, but no matter, today was going to see a long term ambition fulfilled and opportunities to do that don’t tend to come cheap.

Ultimately it was to prove to be a contender for what must be one of the greatest travel bargains on earth.!

The Settle and Carlisle line is regularly cited as England’s most scenic railway. And having risen phoenix like from the threat of closure back in the 1980s, it still fulfills one of the functions that justified its construction, namely a railway route between Yorkshire and the West Coast Main Line linking the two industrial powerhouses of Leeds and Glasgow - though these days you have to change trains at Carlisle.

There’s no need to travel all the way to Carlisle from Leeds to see the best of the scenery, the route begins to flatten out after Appleby, so that was my chosen destination.

Living in London, the modern railway journey from the capital to Glasgow takes me nowhere Leeds. I’ve also  never had any specific reason for needing to go to the likes of Settle or Appleby, or ever likely to, so I was going to have to be a tad eccentric and make the journey simply for the sake of it.

Just to see for myself if the Settle and Carlisle line lived up to its reputation, well I’ll let the pictures below speak for themselves. What I didn’t catch on camera were the huge birds of prey and the RAF fighter jet that flew over the train!

The train itself couldn’t be less romantic, but I made sure that I got to the station in time to bag a seat with a grandstand view. British trains have a knack for not lining up the seats with the windows, but I got lucky.

I was also fortunate with the weather, I’d hoped for a dramatic sky and snow still lingering on the peaks and thanks to a tortuously long winter that was still lingering into April, I wasn’t disappointed.

The line out of Leeds to Skipton must be a contender for England’s most dramatic commuter route, but it’s merely a prelude for the ascent to the country’s highest station at Dent over the awe inspiring Ribblehead viaduct.

Having saved the route from closure, the ‘Friends of The Settle And The Carlisle Line’ have seemingly demonstrated their gratitude by volunteering to restore the majority of the stations to how they appeared in their heyday, when the Midland Railway’s expresses passed by on their way to and from Scotland.

This makes the journey even more charming and makes it easier to imagine that you’re not travelling on such a humdrum train.

In the summer months it’s still possible to travel most of the route behind a magnificent steam engine on The Fellsman which operates every Wednesday in 2013 from June 12th - August 28th -  it’s now been added to mymust do list!

On arrival at Appleby presumably the last of this year’s sleet was falling, so I sought shelter in the award winning bar of the Midland Hotel in the station forecourt. It proved to an excellent location in which to spend a happy hour until it was time for the return journey.

An easy change of train at Skipton then took me to Saltaire to explore one of Britain’s UNESCO World Heritage Sites, the magnificent Salts Mill which is across the road from the station.

A happy hour seeing the permanent David Hockney exhibition and exploring the streets of the one time mill worker’s houses capped a day that surpassed all expectations

Day Two - Over the Moors to Whitby

Maldon station houses an independently owned café that judging by the locals who descended, despite the fact that they weren’t travelling on to anywhere, serves one of the best breakfasts to be found on any station in the British Isles. I was soon regretting that I’d grabbed a bite to eat at Leeds station, but I hadn’t come to Maldon to experience its café.

The railway line between Maldon and Pickering was a Dr Beeching casualty, but unlike so many other routes that lost their trains, the ‘replacement’ bus service to Pickering still departs every hour from Maldon’s bus station.

Very fortuitously the remainder of the railway line from the charming town of Pickering to Whitby was preserved by a band of volunteers and is now the NorthYorkshire Moors Railway. An all-day up and down the line Rover Ticket is a tad pricey at £25, but as the gracious station master at Pickering pointed out, you can travel the length of the line all day, which makes it worth every penny.

On the day I was there, a Saturday, there were only two departures from Pickering all the way to Whitby, but for some reason the engine seemed to be struggling to keep time, as it heaved its train through the landscape.

 In any case the timetable only allowed a brief, tantalising glimpse of Whitby. The choice was spending 15 minutes in the town or four hours, so Britain’s reputably best fish and chips had to be sacrificed for another day, I had steam engine sheds to explore, so it was straight back on the train.

I’d planned on travelling twice over the most scenic stretch of the line between Grosmont and Goathland, 

but with the trains running late I decided not to gamble on missing the hourly bus connection from Pickering. But I couldn’t resist exploring Grosmont station as I’d instantly realised it was heaven on earth for steam train enthusiasts!

Lurking in the shed was arguably the North Yorkshire Moors Railways star attraction, the A4 pacific engine named after its designer, Sir Nigel Gresley.

The delays to the trains caused me to continually look at my watch like an anxious commuter, once I’d reached Goathland, but I made it to the bus stop in Pickering with two minutes to spare and two hours later I was back in Leeds.

Day Three - Drenched in nostalgia at Oakworth

Back in the 1980s ago when I was studying in Yorkshire I could have caught a bus to Keighley from the end of the road, but I never did because in my trying in vain to be ‘oh so cool’ student days, I suppressed my wish to go there.

The Keighley & Worth Valley Railway shares its station in the town 

with the trains from Leeds, so having come to my senses, I was finally about to visit a place I’d yearned to see since I was five years old.

‘The Railway Children’ was the first film I was ever taken to see at a cinema, I would have been too young to see it on first release, so can only assume that the manager of the ABC in Catford was trying to pull in an audience during the school holidays.

I was entranced by the children’s upheaval to the countryside, buy what really captured my imagination was the steam trains that they ran down the fields to see pass by. The station, that became the focus of their adventures, is at Oakworth, on the Keighley  & Worth Valley Railway.

When the film crew descended on Oakworth , the efforts of local volunteers and steam train enthusiasts to restore the line were in their infancy. Only a few years had passed since steam trains had disappeared from Britain’s railways, but the branch line from Keighley was still intact, nobody had yet arrived to remove the track and bulldoze the stations.

The fact that the stations,  the railway and some of its still engines still looked much as they had done when the line was opened back in Victorian times - the branch line up the valley to Oxenhope wasn’t a 1950s Modernisation Plan priority - gave ‘The Railway Children’ so much of its period charm. 

My five year old imagination thought that the film must have been made a hundred years ago, but it couldn’t possibly look like exactly that now, more than 40 years on, surely?

No, not quite, but oh so very nearly and more than enough for me to be entranced.  The copious amounts of volunteers, who have restored the dozens of steam railway lines across Britain, are national heroes to me, but in their efforts to show the best of their craft, the stations and trains are polished so they look like new.

But to my delight it was still possible to spend time at Oakwarth station and feel as though Perks, The ‘The Railway Children’s porter would come dashing out of his beautifully preserved office every time the bell rang.

Back at Keighley station I’d spotted a notice that a tour of the engine shed, down the hill from The Bronte family’s parsonage at Haworth, was being conducted that afternoon, so I grabbed the chance to get close to the engines. In my view too many preserved railways lock them out of site, but this was an opportunity to sneak past the health & safety regulations.

Thanks to our guide I learned why on so many of Britain’s preserved railways, there always seem to be more engines that are static museum pieces, in comparison to those which travel up and down the line. The steam engines need to undergo heavy maintenance approximately every 10 years and even with volunteers carrying out the work, the costs can still spiral to more than £500,000 per engine.

Some of the locomotives are privately owned and the time taken to raise the money and carry out the work means that engines can be in pieces for2 0 years or more.

It explains why smelly old diesels pull some of the trains, it takes such a massive effort to keep the steam engines in working condition.

The volunteers who keep the trains running on the Keighley And Worth Valley Railway and The North Yorkshire Moors Railway deserve nothing but admiration and I hope to join their ranks some day!