IT has been remarked that the remaining 22 miles of the Wensleydale railway represent a time warp and a perfect location for a remake of one of the best-loved comedy films of the twentieth century.

Not that Oh! Mr Porter needs remaking at all. It was funny enough 66 years ago, and remains so today, with its Stockton-born star Will Hay, a supporting actor who reputedly kept five sets of false teeth to play characters almost twice his real age and an overgrown fat boy who later retired from the thespian profession to run a pub.

It was made in 1937, hundreds of miles from Wensleydale, at locations on an obscure Hampshire branch line which was being ripped up even as the film crew progressed because it was no longer paying its way decades before the Beeching age.

There are geographical similarities but the difference is that Wensleydale still has at least part of its rails intact.

His disastrous incompetence as a wheel-tapper and shunter on the English main line having finally been exposed, Will Hay is exiled by his exasperated employers to take charge of a ramshackle and supposedly haunted Irish station, a backwater called Buggleskelly where the forgotten staff of two turn out to be fiddling everything from tickets to bacon.

He makes the last leg of his journey late at night by bus, to be dumped in torrential rain miles from the station he is supposed to be supervising. Hardly the kind of integrated transport to which we aspire in Wensleydale and elsewhere today.

Seeking directions to his final destination, he is told by a surly bus driver that he must walk, with the specific advice: "Drop down into Hell's Hollow and then..."

Hay typically misunderstands and sniffs: "I only asked him a civil question."

Crakehall or Spennithorne stations, built in the middle of nowhere in the nineteenth century, spring to mind as a rain-sodden Hay drags himself and his suitcase through a hole in the lineside fence and knocks on the shuttered window of the booking office at his new home.

The window flies open and an old porter with one front tooth pokes his head through to snap: "'Next train's gone!"

The scene is set for an incomprehensible rigmarole about train times, leading into a daft yet likeable story, brimming with excellent visual railway detail worthy of the Wensleydale branch at its height, about gun runners using an alleged phantom miller as their cover.

Among real buildings reminiscent of wayside stations anywhere between Northallerton and Garsdale, the ancient porter tries to scare his boss by reciting a dreaded folk rhyme: "Every night when the moon gives light, the miller's ghost is seen, he walks the track with a sack on his back and...

"...his earhole painted green," the cynical new stationmaster interrupts as the imagination invokes the spirit of the 10.05pm train into Leyburn on a stormy winter night.

Was such romantic comical nonsense ever known in real life on the tracks of Wensleydale in the old days? It's a tempting thought, but one doubts it.

Country railway staff in those parts were thorough professionals, stalwart members of the old NUR, even if they did not undergo the daily pressures faced by their main line counterparts and had time between trains to look after their own gardens or maintain station flower beds.

They were kept under a vigilant official eye, even if authority did not always know about, or subtly chose to ignore, methods adopted by some staff to earn extra money on the side, using railway property and equipment.

Nobody as manifestly clueless and dishonest as the three characters in Oh! Mr Porter would have been allowed within miles of a porter's barrow, much less a signal box or a steam engine going at full blast.

The line has had its share of characters, though, and snapshots of some of them appear in the latest book by the Northallerton historian Tony Eaton, who confesses that railways are a new subject for him.

Memories of the Wensleydale Railway is an addition to a genre which until now has concentrated largely on the machines rather than the men and women who have helped to run trains.

The human element involved in the Settle to Carlisle line, ranging from the dynamite-wielding engineers and navvies who built it to the people who operated it long after the worn out pioneers had gone to their graves, has been exhaustively documented in books by Bill Mitchell. But, until now, nothing in a similar vein has been attempted in Wensleydale in any detail.

Human interest means that for Mr Eaton some material is inevitably anecdotal, as he acknowledges in references to eggs, milk and pheasants being delivered to and from local farms by train crews for a nominal fee.

Somehow this only adds to the folklore of a line which once played an important part in the life of the community and which, judging by personal observations, is being discovered on a daily basis by a new generation since timetabled passenger trains were reinstated in July by local campaigners.

Close examination of this ground-breaking book reveals some errors of fact and printing that could have been avoided by further checking and better proof reading.

There are some notable omissions, understandable in retrospect given the obvious surfeit of material, which suggest that a supplementary volume might be in order somewhere down the line. The first one, though, is at least a start.

One of the best-known characters was shunter and guard Bill Catchpole, of Northallerton, pictured in 1983 pointing a double-barrelled shotgun - which one assumes was empty at the time - at a brave D&S Times photographer on his retirement after 51 years' railway service. One of his pastimes was hunting for rabbits with his team of ferrets.

Bill's father and a brother also worked on the line, a family trend followed by the Weighells of Northallerton, the Gaythorpes at Leeming Bar and Harry Hartley, a retired track walker now living quietly at Romanby.

Stationmasters far removed from the Will Hay mould included Tom Plummer, Charles Yardley and Norman Darby, all symbols of the strict old school.

In 1962 Norman Darby helped to organise an emergency passenger train service after Wensleydale had been paralysed by snowstorms.

George Foster - who maintained another family tradition of railway employment - recalls how, as a lad porter at Hawes, he once protested that sheep could be roasted alive by stray cinders from a steam engine in unprecedented open wagons which had been brought in to meet an extraordinary and escalating demand for livestock transport. His comments were heeded and open wagons were withdrawn.

Elsewhere we have retired signalman Eric Irving recalling how, at Hawes, the practice of placing warning detonators on the line to see off newly-married couples once backfired.

The explosions startled a horse which was pulling a manure cart in a nearby field. The cart was wrecked as the horse bolted and the farmer claimed compensation.

Struggling to work through snowdrifts, trying to light fires in stone cold steam engines or shepherding Derby winners like Dante into his horse box at Leyburn were just part of the job for those who worked on the Wensleydale line.

Modern society may not recognise it, but such apparently mundane effort sprang from a simple sense of duty.

The book is the result of 18 months' work and Mr Eaton says: "As I went around interviewing people who worked on the line or had some connection with it I just got hooked.

"This was my first railway book but within a month I was wrapped up in it.

"The main problem was how to collate it all and there was so much material that I just could not get in."

Humour was never far from the surface, bringing us back to Will Hay, whose character seems forever bound up with a rural railway now long gone.

Chances are that his old stationmaster would have loved the current Wensleydale scene enjoying an apparent revival.

He has been dead for 54 years, but if his spirit is still around he is probably saying: "I've seen it all before... do you mind if I join you?"

A chorus of voices trying to develop transport for the future would probably reply: "Stay where you are. It was nice knowing you, but this is a serious business."

* Memories of the Wensleydale Railway (£12.95) is available from Ottakars in Northallerton and Darlington or from 50 Turker Lane, Northallerton DL6 1QA, postage and packing £1.50 extra.