John North: A swansong of steam

THE train now standing at Hawes station is going nowhere whatsoever. Old Faithful reached the end of the line 50 years ago this weekend. The branch from Northallerton up Wensleydale had never exactly groaned under the weight of passengers, but by 1954, only two-and-a-half per cent of the community were said to travel by train. British Rail blamed the buses.

On the final day, Saturday, April 24, black flags flew from the hillsides, local undertaker Geoff Pocklington attended Crakehall station in full funereal fig and the Rev T Reynolds Carlin placed a wreath on the smoke box at Redmire.

"It was one of the biggest and merriest funerals Wensleydale has seen," observed the Echo's special correspondent, adding that the bereavement had been bravely borne.

Retired signalman John Mason might not have agreed. It was an occasion for sackcloth and ashes, he said, not for blooming brass bands.

Another railwayman headed off at quarter to five to check his Littlewood's coupon. "If I've won £75,000," he said, "I'll buy it back off them."

The last train was chocker, of course, among the crowd local author Marie Hartley, later with her friend Joan Ingilby to spearhead the Dales Country Museum on Hawes station.

The last train from Northallerton to Hawes left at 4.10pm, the four carriages hauled by engine 65038. At Hawes, noted the Darlington and Stockton Times, a bus crossing the station bridge was engulfed in steam from the departing locomotive.

"Onlookers regarded it as a gesture of contempt by the railway for the vehicle which had driven it out of business."

The following day, engine 67345 - the real Old Faithful, built in Darlington at the turn of the century - pulled the last train of all from Northallerton to Leyburn. There was one carriage, 16 passengers and an empty milk tanker.

It's a replica of 67345 which stands now in Hawes. If the vibrant Wensleydale Railway Association gets its way, it may yet have to move over.

* The born again Wensleydale Railway is running special services to Leyburn on Saturday and Sunday to mark the 50th anniversary of its closure. Details on (01969) 625182 or www.wensleydalerailway.com

HAWES station was an oddity, its architecture manifestly Midland - Derby Gothic, they called it - its staff entirely from the North Eastern, later London North Eastern Railway.

A late 19th century team photograph suggests that some of them might have believed punching a ticket to be a crime under the Offences Against the Person Act of 1847.

The museum's impressive, an altogether better way of putting in a wet Wensleydale afternoon - adults £3, concessions £2, accompanied children free - than corner caf, coffee and cakes.

Described in Stanley Jenkins's "The Wensleydale Branch" as "exuding a faintly ecclesiastical air", the old station buildings retain many architectural features.

Old Faithful heads a rake of three motionless carriages, now home to a cinema coach and other exhibits alongside the main museum.

There's a picture of a frozen Semerwater in 1928, the ice so thick that it supported two motor bikes, an Austin 7 and a game of hockey, another of the Old Gang Tea Festival - "and rustic amusement" - when the lead mine of that name marked its upgrading, another recalling children's games.

In Wensleydale, apparently, hide and seek was called tow law. So what did they call it in Tow Law?

Particularly, however, we were taken by the list of "presentable offences" heard by Bainbridge court rolls - Bainbridge is a village a few miles down dale - in 1830.

They included entertaining lewd women, hedges out of repair, being a "cousin" or drunkard, selling unwholesome beer or ale, not paving the highway before the front door, killing game at night and "false thoughts".

Doubtless a false thought in itself, how on earth did justice find out?

PROBABLY the only good thing about the last rites of the Wensleydale Railway was that it helped fill the paper on a pretty thin news weekend.

At Barnard Castle, a Barford Camp squaddie was court martialled for having a dirty cap badge and belt - he received 28 days and 12 column inches - while at Castle Eden magistrates court, Robert Edward Dixon was fined £2 for playing pitch and toss at Easington, and in Darlington, crowds lined the streets to watch the elephants from Billy Smart's circus, trunk to tail, pass Binns.

The evening after the mourning before, the 13 clubs in the Wensleydale League had been invited by the Rev J E Cowgill to a special Sunday service to mark the start of the cricket season

Only two pitched up. He hadn't meant, said Mr Cowgill, to suggest that all cricketers were heathens.

TRAINS from Hawes to Garsdale, where the line met the Settle and Carlisle Railway, continued once a day until 1959. Doubtless with good cause, the engine was known as Bonnyface.

A few miles up the line, a ceremony this afternoon marks the opening of an on-line weather station - www.SCEN.com - at the bleakly exposed Ribblehead station.

Last time we were up there, it was almost impossible to stand. On Tuesday, said the weather station, it was dry, sunny and with barely enough wind to cool the signalman's ten o'clocks. They must have been expecting visitors.

THE last column had one or two railway lines as well, including the claim that 34 streamlined A4 Pacifics were built before the war. In fact, points out J Smith from Bishop Auckland, there were 35.

The name of 4469 was changed in 1939 from Gadwall (a duck) to Sir Ralph Wedgwood (a railway gaffer). On April 29, 1942, however, the Baedecker air raid on York scored a direct hit on the engine sheds, destroying 4469.

Sir Ralph Wedgwood's name was transferred to 4466, formerly Herring Gull.

The Baedecker raid? "So named," says Mr Smith, "because allegedly, the Germans had no accurate maps of York and used Baedecker tourist guides to identify their targets."

YET more trains of thought, pinched from the ever-excellent Church Times column written by the Rev David Wilbourne, Vicar of Helmsley - Feversham country - in North Yorkshire.

Mr Wilbourne recalls a recent funeral at one of his churches, at which a well dressed woman asked the chap who squeezed in next to her if he'd come far.

"From Canada," he said, explaining that he and the deceased were distant - indeed transatlantic - cousins.

His great grandfather had been Helmsley's station master around 1900, ordered one day to hold the 9am York train for the arrival of Lord Feversham.

When nine o'clock came and went without sign of his lordship doing the same, the station master let the train go, too.

"Lord Feversham was furious when finally he arrived and since he was a director of the railway company, had my great grandfather dismissed. Fed up with the feudal state of things here, he emigrated to Canada."

"How very interesting," the woman replied, and was asked if she in turn had come far.

"No, I live here," she replied sweetly. "I'm the present Lady Feversham."

STILL with the nobility, and indeed with the clergy, we are grateful for the Telegraph's obituary on Lord Scarborough, born at Lumley Castle - overlooking what is now Durham County cricket ground - and still the castle's owner.

"Dickon" Scarborouh, who was 71, had planned his own funeral to the last detail, right down to instructions to the vicar.

"As I hate addresses even more than sermons, you are to speak for no more than three minutes," he said. "Any more, and I shall haunt you."