John North: The train that was two months late

THE taxi fare from Carlisle to Penrith last week was £29.80, which may not (on this occasion) be put down to The Northern Echo. Rather it is down to rueful experience.

For 100 years there was a perfectly good and scenically majestic railway line between Darlington and Penrith, steam rolling 60 miles across the Pennines via Barnard Castle, Kirkby Stephen and some improbably engineered viaducts.

Despite a two year protest campaign, they closed the Stainmore railway 40 years ago, on January 20, 1962. Now non-drivers must entrain from Darlington to Newcastle, Newcastle to Carlisle and - should the timings not dismally disconnect - from Carlisle to Penrith.

It is almost twice as far and takes about twice as long. "Ah," says David Heywood, "it is what they call progress."

David and his colleagues on the Eden Valley Railway Trust hope later this year to re-open part of the line to steam traction, plan summer exhibitions to mark the 40th anniversary of its closure and stage open days at Warcop railway station - near Appleby - on Easter Sunday and Monday.

The brave new line opened in 1861, its Cumbrian terminus originally at Tebay, about two hours from Darlington.

The high point was Stainmore summit, 1,370 feet above sea level. The most stupendous constructions were the soaring iron-lattice viaducts at Deepdale and at Belah - 160ft and 196ft - designed by Thomas Bouch and built by navvies on three shillings a dirty day. Uniquely for such tumultuous terrain, there wasn't a single tunnel.

Chiefly the railway was intended to carry coal from the North-East to the Cumbrian coast and iron ore in the opposite direction, though passenger services were soon supplemented by excursions to the Lakes and by summer specials between Tyneside and Blackpool.

There were even trains to carry miners (and concerned NUM officials) between Durham and the union convalescent home at Ulverston.

Mr Heywood, now a shoe repairer in Barnard Castle, just caught the Stainmore trains before they ripped up the line. "I remember sitting in the front of the diesel multiple unit, seeing the summit as a hump which suddenly disappeared as you went over the top.

"After that, the view down to the Eden Valley was absolutely staggering. It is a very great shame that it was allowed to close."

The last day was marked by a steam special, double headed from Darlington, crowded with 400 camera-carrying enthusiasts and intermittently greeted by pipers playing Auld Lang Syne.

Two Newcastle Royal Grammar School boys wore black ties and placed a wreath on the leading engine, penny farthings at Kirkby Stephen station symbolised - it was said - that transport has back-pedalled 100 years.

"How would Ernest Marples (the transport minister) like it if we took his train away from him?" demanded Watson Sayer, the Kirkby Stephen quarry owner who had vainly tried to buy the line from British Rail.

Letters to the Echo claimed that Stainmore had been murdered, and that a replacement motorway should at once be built across the Pennines.

"Kirkby Stephen's transport future now lies in being a staging post for charabancs to Blackpool and the Lakes," commented an editorial.

We had been attempting the roundabout route in order (inevitably) to watch a football match. It will be little surprise that, after such a diversion, the game ended goalless. Others may get their kicks on the A66, the column still longs for the Stainmore Railway.

JANUARY 20, 1962? The threat of closure was lifted (though not for long) from the 3,000 men at the North Road railway works in Darlington, 30 miners made redundant at Dean and Chapter colliery in Ferryhill were added to the 1,472 payroll at Washington "F" pit, 450 were on strike at Wilson's Forge in Bishop Auckland and Adam Faith, singer, had hit a wrong note with Donald Coggan, Archbishop of York

"Adam Faith tells youngsters that the meaning of life is sex," bemoaned Dr Coggan. "Life is more than just a going-on."

Mr Faith is best remembered for subversive little numbers like A Lonely Pup in a Christmas Shop.

THE Stainmore Railway's principal problem, of course, was that it could get a bit wild up there - never more bleakly than in the long and lugubrious winter of 1947.

"If the plains were getting snow," observed the late Ken Hoole in his 1973 history of the line, "then Stainmore was getting raging blizzards."

On February 3, 1947, a Kirkby Stephen to Darlington train became stuck on the one-in-59 climb near the summit, the last carriage retrieved and passengers taken back to Kirkby for the night. After a week, rescue teams were three miles further apart than when they started; after a fast frozen fortnight the Army brought in flame throwers. It was hissing against the wind.

On March 1 they sent in two rail-mounted Rolls-Royce jet engines. Stainmore's snow drifts proved immovable.

Explosives loosened the snow and ice but still it had to be moved manually because the machinery froze. "There has still been no better snow clearing method than a pair of hands and a large shovel," wrote Ken Hoole.

By March 7, teams working from opposite ends were just a mile apart when it started snowing again.

It was the end of March, almost two months after the night train from Kirby Stephen failed in its optimistic assault on Stainmore, that that wonderful railway was re-opened.

DAVID Heywood, the previously-mentioned Eden Valley Railway Trust's archivist, has amassed a large collection of Stainmore souvenirs at his home in Teesdale. Not living in the past, however, the Trust is confident of shortly starting a two mile steam shuttle service from Warcop station, its headquarters.

By 2005, they hope to re-introduce a passenger service on the six mile stretch to Appleby, the track still in place because until recently it was used by the Army. By 2010, they aim to have extended in the opposite direction to Kirkby Stephen - including a £1.5m replacement for the Musgrave viaduct.

To re-open the entire line, so that people may watch Penrith play Prudhoe in peace, remains an official aim if not a realistic hope.

Rebuilding the Belah viaduct, demolished the year after closure, would alone mean finding £25m. Originally it cost just £30,000.

"It would be brilliant to have the railway back into Barnard Castle and there are the engineering skills to make it possible," says David.

"Personally, however, I don't think that it will happen. The costs are just too great - those viaducts should have been listed buildings in the first place."

The exhibitions are in Barnard Castle Parish Hall on May 11-12, Kirkby Stephen Masonic Hall on June 22-23 and Appleby Heritage Centre on August 17-18.

MINERAL trains also ran over Stainmore to Millom, the west Cumbrian outpost much recently featured hereabouts. Now we hear from Millom exile David Lassut, who's writing a book about the dear old town and wants to include the column's contribution. "The manuscript is irreverent and, I hope, funny," he says. "It plays along with what you have to say, only it's far worse." Funniest thing of all is that we wanted to give the impression we quite liked the place.

THE Stokesley Stockbroker, it transpires, not only dallied in share certificates from the lustrously named Millom Haematite Iron Ore Co Ltd - and may in no way be held responsible for its demise - not only addressed a 1970s public meeting in Millom ("I need not bore you with the reason") but recalls an unfortunate genetic quirk about that time.

The town, it's fair to say, had an amount of in-breeding, which led to babies being born with an extra thumb.

One day a fortnight, he recalls, a surgeon from the West Cumberland Infirmary in Whitehaven would be assigned to deal with the condition. It was known, of course, as the Millom Thumb.

...and finally, last week's somnolent reference to Horlick's was quickly followed by a cassette from the unsurpassable Hails of Hartlepool of something called the Horlick's Picture Show. Immediately post-war probably, it features the likes of the Western Brothers, Arthur Askey and Stinker Murdoch, Vic Oliver and Two Ton Tessie O'Shea. It probably kept them awake all night.