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Unique video: 40 years on, travel back to railway's golden age
Stephen McClarence has a brief encounter with Keighley and Worth Valley Railway, which is 40 years old next weekend.
To press home just what a treasure the Keighley and Worth Valley Railway is, I start my day out by taking an ordinary, everyday train from Leeds station to Keighley.
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In that great, gloomy grey shed, hurrying passengers are bombarded with announcements... about not leaving luggage unattended, about not skateboarding or rollerblading, about how "security personnel tour this station 24 hours a day". All alarmingly urgent.
The Keighley and Worth Valley, celebrating its 40th anniversary next weekend, couldn't be more different. Chuffing and chuntering from Keighley to Oxenhope via Haworth, its trains travel five miles uphill and five decades back in time, to an easy-going world where steam hissed and pistons thrust and nothing was too much trouble for cheery porters.
It would be nice to think this world really did exist outside Ladybird books and Ealing comedies. Whether or not, it was effortlessly recreated the only other time I've been on the KWVR, in the late 1990s. Then, I took a steam train from Keighley to Haworth. It was a lovely day, full of charm, up in the moorlands so soon after setting off, with maroon and cream signs on the stations, and waiting rooms with 1950s railway posters of Plymouth (smart young sailors chatting up pretty gals in cocktail dresses).
The train sent great plumes of smoke drifting down the valley, there was a faint, authentic whiff of musty seats, the windows had red triangular 'No Smoking' signs and the atmosphere was all day-out, day-off, day excursion, with everyone pleased as Punch to be – even for just half-an-hour – back in a less urgent age. It was as though a childhood model railway had suddenly come magically to life.
That sort of sepia-tinged nostalgia has been the line's great selling point for the past 40 years. It may have opened in 1867 for utilitarian reasons – to take coal up to the Worth Valley's woollen mills. It may have closed in 1962 for cost-cutting reasons. But the preservationists who stepped in to reopen it had something far more romantic in mind. Their idea was to recreate the atmosphere of a country branch line in the '50s.
They did a thorough job. In winter, the line's stations are lit by gaslight and their waiting rooms are heated by coal fires. Thanks to such period detail, the KWVR has featured regularly on film and TV, most famously in The Railway Children.
Steam trains are obviously central to its appeal and will feature at next weekend's anniversary gala, with special trains to Skipton, Hellifield and Settle, and across the Ribblehead Viaduct. But there are other, less widely cherished trains – diesels.
They're what I've come to Keighley to see this time – a diesel gala, including a celebration of the centenary of the railway poster of the Jolly Fisherman, whose ballooning, rather flatulent gaiety has come to symbolise Skegness.
As I hurry across Keighley station from the train from Leeds (20 minutes late), half of Skegness seems to have turned up (mostly by car) to join the celebration. Here are Skegness's Mr and Mrs Mayor, resplendent in chains of office. Here is someone dressed up as the Blobby-like Jolly Fisherman, shaking hands with all-comers, but keeping his thoughts, however jolly, to himself.
Here are men with rucksacks and Jolly Fisherman ties, photographing each other alongside diesel engines, which, to an outsider, pack a smaller romantic punch than steam ones.
"There are thousands and thousands of people interested in diesels," says Chris Bates, affable spokesman for the KWVR. "To my eyes, they look modern, but they're historic machines for anyone under 40. Diesel enthusiasts tend to like riding on the trains, whereas steam enthusiasts tend to like to stand by the track and take photographs."
There are other differences, as we'll see, from the usual family audience the KWVR attracts, but for the moment, we climb on the train, celebratory sandwiches and drinks are brought round and a man from Skegness tells me about a plan to run a narrow-gauge preserved railway around a caravan park.
"One-and-a-half miles at eight to 10 miles an hour," he says. It will celebrate the Lincolnshire potato railways. A whole new and intriguing world opens up.
"Make sure we don't leave Jolly behind," says Chris Bates. "He's in the guard's van," someone reassures him. A fine way to treat an icon.
We head uphill and Bates sketches in the KWVR story. "It was an open secret from the 1950s onwards that British Railways would eventually close the line," he says. "The politics were against branch lines, more and more people were using cars. A meeting was called in 1962 and people said they could run it themselves. It was revolutionary. Some thought: 'They're crackers; it will never work; impossible.' No-one had ever taken on a complete branch line and run it."
As it turned out, these volunteers, many of them fond of dressing up in old uniforms, weren't crackers. Up to 160,000 people a year come to Keighley specifically to ride on the railway; the preservation society has 5,600 members worldwide; and there are 350 active members, shovelling coal and blowing whistles.
It may subtly shift the role of railways from a vital every-day transport system to a leisure-and-pleasure treat, but that's, sadly, in line with current trends. I know people who haven't travelled by train for 25 years. Wouldn't dream of it. Why would you, they say, if you've got a car?
Paul Brown, the society's chairman, joins us, pint in hand. Don't some people see "heritage" railways as glorified train sets for grown men to play with?
"People are entitled to their opinions, but I don't see it like that," he says, patiently. "They probably think of trainspotters and anoraks, but we have a lot of professional railwaymen in the society."
Chris Bates chips in: "It's a hobby that's got to be run as a business."
We arrive in Oxenhope, pause for more photographs with Mr Mayor and Jolly, and set off back. I get off in Haworth, the train pulls away and only birdsong disturbs the silence. Haworth is one of the prettiest of the KWVR's six stations, with lupins alongside the line and vintage posters of Skipton that make it look the centre of the railway universe – the hub of lines to Lancaster, Carlisle, Ilkley, Bradford and Leeds (to London) and Colne and Burnley (to Manchester).
The gift shop is a rail enthusiast's heaven, with books including a history of the Anglo-Chilean Nitrate and Railway Company and DVDs including Narrow Gauge Railways in Romania and Shap's Steam Twilight. I look in vain, however, for a video I spotted back in the '90s (A Busy Day at Barnetby and Ulceby Junction) and a CD (Grantham Station on a Damp August Night in 1961: surely a poem by Philip Larkin).
A train pulls in, crammed with diesel enthusiasts, mostly in their 20s, 30s or 40s, mostly male, leaning out of the windows, cameras in hand. "People will come from Scotland and south Devon for these weekends," says Michael Tarran, serving in the shop. "Some enthusiasts will go hundreds of miles just to see a particular diesel passing. They tend to make a bee-line for the front coach because they get the sound of the engine louder there."
Booking clerk Keith Taylorson confirms all this. "They're very enthusiastic. Some will be on the trains for 14 hours today, going backwards and forwards."
Another society member talks darkly of the diesel enthusiasts' fondness for beer and the way things can sometimes get "a bit fraught" as the day wears on and "the effects of alcohol get more apparent". (Thomas the Tanked-Up Engine?)
By mid-afternoon, there's certainly plenty of camaraderie on the train I catch down to Ingrow station, past Oakworth, with its hanging-baskets and tinplate signs (Old Calabor Dog Food…Venus Soap Saves Rubbing), past Damems, Britain's smallest station, past men perched with cameras and tripods, past high moors and snaking stone walls, allotments and white horses in fields of buttercups. At Ingrow, one stop short of Keighley, there are two fine railway museums, including the Museum of Rail Travel, a pocket version of York's National Railway Museum. It has souvenirs of long-extinct railway companies with impenetrable initials (MSJ&AR, GW&L&NWJ), superbly restored carriages, signs for stations at Seaton Delaval, Arthington South and Acton Grange Junction.
On Ingrow's platform, old suitcases and trunks are piled high on porters' trolleys, Brief Encounter vintage. Round any corner, Trevor Howard and Celia Johnson may be having a guilt-haunted tryst. Terribly romantic. Like the KWVR itself.
Keighley and Worth Valley Railway: 01535 645214 (www.kwvr.co.uk)
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Saturday 26 May 2012
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