4 May, 2001

John Sheard raises a glass to the success of the Settle-Carlisle Railway whose role in future rural tourism may prove to be historic.

THE BANDS were playing, the flags were flying, the VIPs were out in force. In the Dales fields, young lambs ran in panic as this strange, noisy, smoking monster rushed through the countryside.

North of Dent, however, the Cumbrian fields were curiously empty, miles and miles of good grazing land devoid of cattle on this wonderful May Day: gone to the incinerators, every one, thanks to foot and mouth. This was the celebration of the 125th anniversary of the opening of the Settle-Carlisle Railway to passenger traffic, several hundred railway buffs pulled in old carriages behind The Glasgow Highlander, an LMS Stanier Black steam loco.

The Glasgow Highlander during the celebrations

Now, readers may ask, what has a celebration of the past got to do with the future of our countryside in the wake of foot and mouth? Well, I shall try to answer that twofold: one in praise of the British amateur spirit, the other in the growing importance of so-called "green" tourism.

For the Settle-Carlisle would no longer exist today but for a bunch of dedicated amateurs who rose up to fight the then nationalised British Rail who were determined to close down the line because, they said, it was impossibly expensive to maintain.

Even that, as it turned out, was being economical with the truth. At the lengthy enquiry over the future of the line, the son of Barnes Wallace, the famous inventor of the bouncing bomb used in the Dambuster raids during World War 11, turned up to give evidence for the protestors.

He was, you see, a highly qualified railway engineer and he claimed that BR had wildly over-estimated the costs of maintaining structures like the Ribblehead Viaduct. The amateurs won the day but BR appeared to react in fury.

I shall never forget the sense of outrage I felt when they began to demolish sturdy, almost indestructible, stone railway bridges on the Skipton-Colne line, which then led onto Manchester and Liverpool.

The line had been long been closed but, it seemed to me, destroying those bridges was not just an act of vandalism but almost an act of revenge: let's make it totally impossible to re-open the line; let Dales folk wanting to go to Lancashire make a huge detour via Leeds.

Ribblehead Station

It was the pioneers of Friends of the Settle and Carlisle who pushed the importance of railways back into the public conciousness: amateur run railway lines were springing up around the country. And it is only now that people in authority - that means, in Parliament and Whitehall - have suddenly realised that railways are important. And they are particularly important to rural areas like the Dales with their heavy reliance on tourism.

Trouble is, country tourism carries a potentially fatal Catch 22: the more people who want to visit the beauty of our wild uplands, the more they destroy what they have come to see.

The culprits are the motorcar and the motor coach. They block the winding roads, fill the air with noise and fumes, and often park in farm gates and drives bringing work on the land to a halt. Country professionals like doctors, nurses, vets, fire and ambulance services with urgent work afoot find themselves grid-locked in a traffic nightmare.

So, as often as not, townies return from their "quiet" day in the country just as stressed out as having driven to the office on a working weekday.

Yet all along, we have had the answer: the train met, as now happens at Skipton station, by small rural "hopper" bus services. For this, the preservation of the Settle-Carlisle was a triumph of the amateur spirit over the dead-weight of officialdom.

But this was only the start. Other moves are underway which, fingers crossed, could open even more of the Dales to rail traffic.

A new organisation called HELP - the Hellifield and East Lancashire Partnership - has been created with the backing of the Friends of the Settle Carlisle to re-establish those once powerful links with North Yorkshire from the great industrial conurbations of the North West.

HELP's aim is to restore regular daily services between Hellifield to Clitheroe, Blackburn, Bolton, Manchester and Manchester Airport, avoiding that huge loop via Leeds.

And in Wensleydale, another group of hard-working amateurs are trying to re-open the old line from the East Coast to Hawes, making the Northern Dales easily accessible from the great cities of the North East.

These will not be easy battles to fight in today's fragmented rail network. But new, privately owned railway companies seem eager to pick up new business wherever they can find it - which cannot be said of old-style British Rail.

I wish them all the best. Apart from anything else, with a good train service you could have a nice walk in the country and a well-deserved pint in the pub afterwards without the worry of breathalyser problems.

So this week, I shall raise a glass to the Friends of the Settle-Carlisle Railway and their would-be followers in the North West and North East. Cheers!