The railway that's never run out of steam

GEORGE Catchpole, an engine driver on the Wensleydale Railway, sometimes made an unscheduled halt. Usually it was when his brother Bill was guard on the same train. Their sister lived by the track near Newton-le-Willows. The brothers would stop for a cuppa, with Bill sometimes taking away bacon and eggs, which he fried at Leyburn on a shovel thrust into the firebox of the engine.

The brothers repaid their sister's hospitality by often tossing an outsize lump of coal on to the trackside as their train passed her cottage.

Yes, the branch-line idyll certainly existed on the Wensleydale Railway. One signalman whiled away time between the not-too-frequent trains by shooting rabbits. Hawes porter George Foster sometimes nipped over the station fence to help a farmer snag turnips. He ruefully recalls: "For all the turnips I snagged, I never received any payment."

No-one seems to have been unduly overworked, and the staffing level might be considered to have been generous. In 1943 - wartime - Bedale stationmaster Tom Plummer had command of two signalmen, two porters, four drivers and half a dozen clerks. After the war his team had ample opportunity to keep the station up to Tom's high standards. In 1953, it won the regional prizes for both best-kept station and best garden. The plants were raised in a greenhouse by Tom's wife and her sister, who both worked at the station.

No doubt typical of a country branch, the line's surprisingly large labour force has brought a late benefit. It has enabled Tony Eaton, himself once a Leyburn-based Wensleydale Railway motor driver, to gather a rich collection of memories. Important social history in their own right, they have gained strong instant currency with the remarkable revival of the branch.

Now operating daily over the 17 miles between Leeming and Redmire, it looks set to add the five-mile Leeming to Northallerton link ere too long, and hopes are high that one day trains will return along the full 40 miles from Northallerton to Garsdale. When they do, the Wensleydale Railway will become, in distance and landscape quality, easily Britain's finest restored railway. As Tony Eaton acknowledges, histories of the line already exist. But to their generally broad content, he has added a score or more of memories by a virtually full range of staff, from station masters and signalmen to track walkers and clerks.

Not all the stories are in the Will Hay category. Accidents figure, and Margaret Chambers, a wartime evacuee from Tyneside - a rare non-railway voice - recalls how, after arriving at Askrigg station, she and the other evacuees were promptly subjected to having their hair vigorously washed with a "strange liquid" - Jeyes fluid. "The Dales folk assumed that all children from large places such as Gateshead, Newcastle and Sunderland must have had head lice and so they were treated accordingly." Shame on you, Dales folk.

Happier are accounts of the line's unusual horse-box service, an LNER initiative to attract business from Middleham's racehorse trainers, none of whom owned a horse-box. Throughout the entire country only Malton, another LNER station, had a similar service.

Motor mechanic Jack Dent, who helped maintain five boxes based at Leyburn, recalls how on race days, their drivers wore smart double-breasted uniforms, complete with gold buttons and a chauffeur's cap. "They had to look the part as they might be in the presence of dukes, lords and knights, to say nothing of royalty."

Impressively, Tony has obtained good-quality head-shots of most of his main subjects. Introducing their memories, these also appear, with those of other former WR staff named in the text, in an extensive photo gallery of "Wensleydale Railway Characters". Tony even outlines the post-railway careers of many of the former employees, sadly often culminating in a date of death. The whole package is well organised and amply illustrated with drawings and photos in colour (12 pages) and black-and-white.

Every "heritage" railway has a stack of publications devoted to it. But it is doubtful if any can rival the picture of a rural railway at work that emerges from this remarkable wealth of memories. Considering that the line closed for passengers in 1954 and completely in 1967, Tony Eaton's success in bringing them attractively together is a notable achievement, for which more than the immediate fans of the Wensleydale Railway should be grateful.

Published: 17/05/2005