RUTH ANNISON is one of those wonderful, endlessly enthusiastic, community conscious souls who seems to have a hand in everything. Her latest project is a two-day party in August to mark the 140th birthday of Garsdale railway station, high on Wensleydale’s wild and western fringe.

I email her. “Garsdale station is one of the most glorious places in Christendom,” says the message.

Ruth rings in return. “It’s the centre of the universe,” she says.

Clearly we run along similar lines. Two days ago, helped along by the Sundays only 856 bus from Northallerton, we journey to the centre of the universe.

BRANDED the Wensleydale Flyer, the 856 pulls up at Leeming Village, near the A1, and heads directly westwards to Hawes.

Sun and spirits are high, the atmosphere redolent of that long gone bus journey to Blaydon Races. “All the lads and lasses there, all with smiling faces…”

“I’m fed up,” someone says, still cheerfully, “I’m only going to Bedale.”

It continues through delightful villages like Constable Burton (which 20 years ago really did have a community policeman called PC Burton) and Patrick Brompton, which recalls a family game in which participants were invited to name a cricket team drawn (as it were) from North-East towns and villages.

Percy Main was usually captain, Patrick Brompton and Bill Quay automatic choices. Askham Bryan bent the rules a bit; the team had to be awfully short before Coulby Newham got a game.

The bus is pretty full, the Flyer’s wings clipped only by a great phalanx of cyclists which seems almost nose-to-tail along the A684. “Live and let live,” says bus campaigner Sheila Sims, who joins at Leyburn, though it is not a view with which the lady of this house might concur.

Sharon is seriously cyclo-phobic.

Ruth Annison joins at Bainbridge, a mile-or-so from her home. “Last week it was caravans on the way to Appleby, this week it’s cyclists,” she says affably.

We’re into Hawes ten minutes late. Though it would be possible specially to book a Little White Bus to complete the remaining six miles of the journey, the lady waits in the car. Somehow she’s missed all the cyclists.

IT’S Garsdale as few may have known it, which is to say it’s not raining. Truth to tell, it’s beautiful. We sit on the up platform, soak the sun, talk about what’s planned for August 6 and 7.

Ruth’s reluctant to go into too much detail. “I haven’t yet got all my ducks in a row, that’s the modern phrase isn’t it?” she says.

An intending passenger wanders up seeking advice. For both bus and train services, Ruth’s almost a talking timetable. “She probably even knows what the bus driver has in his sandwiches,” says Sharon.

Ruth’s interest is as strategic as it is romantic. “It’s between the A1 and the M6, on the Pennine Way, the Yorkshire Dales National Park.

“People ask me why I’m making a fuss of the 140th, but I mightn’t be running around as much in ten years' time. It’s about promoting it now.”

The station’s on what now is the Settle and Carlisle line, opened on August 4, 1876 and which also became the terminus of the 40-mile branch from Northallerton, worked latterly between Garsdale and Hawes by an elderly tank engine called Bonnyface.

Whatever else they called Bonnyface, it probably wasn’t the Wensleydale Flyer.

John Bull magazine featured the station in 1950, the headline explicit. “Change here for the back of beyond,” it said.

The branch was lopped in 1959. The station closed in 1970 but, like several others on the Settle and Carlisle line, was reopened 16 years later.

These days it’s kept immaculately, chiefly thanks to the Friends of the Settle and Carlisle who do everything from maintaining the flower beds to cleaning the waiting room. Once they even painted the white lines on the edge of the platform.

“The railway company rang one day to ask if they could borrow our white paint,” Ruth recalls. “I asked if Prince Charles was coming. He was.”

Already the Wensleydale Railway has reopened the branch between Northallerton West and Redmire, above Leyburn. Soon they hope to get the go-ahead to extend to Aysgarth, three miles further.

The hope has always been that the east-west connection can completely be re-established, though the stretch from Garsdale to Hawes may be more probable. “I don’t dream of steam or anything like that,” says Ruth. “My personal interest is just to have the infrastructure there, thousands of tourists down to Hawes. Others may dream of steam, I just want trains.

“I’m admitting for the first time this year that the bit in the middle (Hawes to Aysgarth) might be a bit more difficult, but I can imagine Hawes to Garsdale. There’s lots going on behind the scenes. It would be the biggest single deal for economic regeneration that Wensleydale has ever had.”

COINCIDENTALLY. she was born at Wensley in Derbyshire, first heard of Hawes when she was 12 when a song about Santa coming to Hawes in a horse and cart was played on the radio programme Children’s Favourites.

She and her husband Peter moved to the dales in 1975, three years after he’d been diagnosed with cancer, given three months to live and underwent what at the time was revolutionary chemotherapy treatment.

“I don’t know if the change of scenery, a less stressful lifestyle, had something to do with it,” says Ruth. “I’m sure it’s the person’s attitude, too.”

She was a catering lecturer at Darlington College before together they bought Hawes Ropeworks, which still they run.

Once there was a huge run on skipping ropes, including demands from differing Irish factions that they be either red or green. “I never knew that skipping ropes could be political,” she says, “but we knew we’d made it when we got cheques from Coutts’ Bank.”

Unable to drive because of a shoulder injury, she also champions the local buses – though to attend a 10am meeting in Northallerton, 30 miles from home, had to leave at lunchtime the previous day, make two changes and book into a B&B. “Dalesbus do the most incredible work and they’re a charity. It’s easy to complain that there’s nothing, but there is. It’s just not always done properly.”

We head back eastwards in the car.

GARSDALE’S darkest day was on Christmas Eve, 1910, when a signalman’s error “wrecked the Scotch express”. Bodies were brought back to the Moorcock Inn, less than a mile away, the inquest held there three days later.

These days the Moorcock’s altogether happier, run by another Settle and Carlisle signalman and his family – clean, comfortable and serving coffee and splendid home made cake.

Perhaps further to ice the cake, we stop off. Ruth says she’s confident that Garsdale can have a very happy birthday. When the ducks are in a row, we’ll hear more.