SINCE Garsdale railway station may already be the closest place to heaven within these sceptred shores, an open-air church service on the up platform could be deemed to start with a distinct – some might say unfair – advantage.

Garsdale is at Wensleydale’s westernmost extreme, stupendously set on the Settle and Carlisle, opened in 1876. Bill Mitchell, the celebrated Dales author, supposed the station never quite to have looked at home up there, almost to be an imposition, and in that respect – that alone – he was mistaken.

Without a railway, Garsdale’s w i l d e r n e s s would truly be fabulous. With one, it’s fabulous squared. Whoever believed the Great Western to be God’s Wonderful Railway was similarly mistaken: GWR is Garsdale’s.

Originally it was Hawes Junction, the single track, six-mile branch down to Hawes worked by an elderly loco known locally as Bonnyface, though for reasons not immediately evident. The branch closed in 1959, Garsdale station itself in 1970. It was reopened in 1986, a semi-permanent axe threat having finally been lifted from the line.

Now, it’s never been busier, has benefited from the railway companies’ £100m investment, sings like a summer skylark. Last Sunday’s service may have been considered a celebration not just of that but of nature, of railways and of resilience.

The car park overflowed, the overflow overflowed, both platforms joyously crowded like a Sunday School outing. Though the sun shone, all remembered the adage about ne’er casting a clout. It was only May 28, after all, and on the Settle and Carlisle the weather forecast is always to expect the worst.

The only problem may have been the photographer, bless her, who – guided by her sat-nav – overshot by four miles. It never happened to the sat-navvies, the men who built that most extraordinary railway over that most inhospitable terrain and who died, in their hundreds, in so doing. Those lads were inch perfect.

STILL the railwaymen’s cottages remain, stone built and stoical. One was for sale – three bedrooms, no garden, £185,000.

Temptation blows in the breeze; get thee behind me. Either side of the war they’d held Church of England services in the waiting room, the humdrum harmonium billed as the ill wind that blew no one any good.

The services attracted the Daily Express in 1937 – “a remote Yorkshire hamlet,” it said, not unreasonably – and in 1950 John Bull magazine. The headline was unequivocal: “Change here for the back of beyond,” it said.

They had dances, too, in the room beneath the 80,000 gallon water tank.

“It were a reight good do, we had t’piano ower three times,” someone told Bill in one of his books. He never quite worked out if they were joking.

Half a mile below, opened at the same time as the railway, stands the lovely little Hawes Junction Methodist chapel, known sometimes as Mount Zion. Bill Mitchell supposed (rightly) the dale to be chiefly Methodist, and with a faith that could move mountains.

Sunday’s service is led by Canon Bill Greetham, a former vicar of Crakehall and neighbouring parishes near Bedale who’d moved to Kirkby Stephen and found himself embroiled in the fight to save the line.

He even spoke at the public inquiry – “I think I got quite impassioned,”

he recalls – and is now a volunteer train guide. “It’s a bit like parish visiting, it presents pastoral opportunities just by talking to people,”

he says.

The service is accompanied by Hawes Silver Band in their Sundaybest jackets – Hawes band may be acclimatised – and by Gunnerside choir, up and over from Swaledale.

Bill Mitchell, 82, gives out the service sheets. A steam man by inclination, Bill had deemed the new diesel multiple units to resemble greyhounds.

Maybe they do, creeping almost silently, muzzled, into the station when everyone’s back is turned.

Canon Greetham notes the sun – “someone’s looking after us” – accurately forecasts that it’s going to hang around. We sing For the Beauty of the Earth; it could hardly be more appropriate.

THE reading’s intriguing. Just when we’re mentally supposing that there couldn’t be a biblical text about railways, about passing loops or Walschaerts valve gear, they come up with Isaiah 6, 1-8.

“His train filled the temple.” There’s a bit about coals of fire and being filled with smoke, as well.

Bill Greetham, now 70 and retired, recalls in his address the famous Garsdale turntable, the about-face analogy easily made. He may have wondered how the locomotives stayed on the turntable at all, how the Helm wind blasted them so greatly that the turntable had to be stockaded, how Garsdale’s Wonderful Railway still ended up on the right track.

Proceedings are overseen by an £8,000 bronze memorial to Ruswarp, a collie that had belonged to one of the Settle and Carlisle’s most avid proponents who had died while walking in Wales. Ruswarp, his paw mark allowed on the anti-closure petition, had attended the funeral, but himself died soon afterwards.

The signalman never once emerges from his cabin on the opposite platform.

Probably there are Rules.

Afterwards we’re all down to the chapel for a buffer lunch, the tiny building – official membership two – having benefited from a £30,000 kitchen and toilet since last we were there. Bill Mitchell says he’s particularly grateful for the toilet.

One of Bill’s innumerable records describes the chapel’s opening, thanks to the “accustomed liberality”

of the railway contractors. The site was thought “very eligible”, the interior “chaste”, the building neat and substantial. Once it had seventy scholars and nine teachers. Goodness knows where they came from.

The spread’s magnificent, the chapel so full that they even sit in the pulpit. The weather’s set fair. GWR rolls on.

■ The centenary of one of the worst railway accidents in the Garsdale area, the wreck of the “Scotch express”

on Christmas Eve 1910, will be marked with a special service at Hawes parish church at 2.30pm on Sunday, December 5. It may safely be assumed that the column will be there, as well.