WHAT started as a seemingly impossible dream from a group of rail enthusiasts to reopen the Weardale Railway is now, a decade later, a key element in an ambitious economic strategy.

Business leaders and regeneration experts are enthusing over the project, which consultants say could bring in 90,000 extra visitors to the dale, create 75 jobs, including 15 on the railway, and put £3m a year into the pockets of locals.

Even if the final figures fall short of these targets, the railway is bound to bring in business, as a recent jobs summit at Auckland Castle, Bishop Auckland, was told.

A tourist line linked with the new Shildon Railway Village is an exciting prospect for a task force working to revive the dale's fragile economy, while lines into the former cement works site at Eastgate and a planned industrial park at Wolsingham could help attract new business projects.

Dr John Bridge, chairman of One NorthEast and former task force chairman, said: "As the new strategic lead agency for tourism in the region, One NorthEast is keen to develop projects that will attract visitors and contribute to the economy of local areas. We are confident that the Weardale Railway has the potential to do just this."

Pipedreams that helped pioneers to steam ahead

RUNNING a railway along the valley of the River Wear was one of the pipedreams of the steam pioneers from their earliest days.

Even before the Stockton and Darlington Railway (S&DR) opened in 1825, they were working out how many tons of precious minerals could be carried out of Weardale on their trains. So excited did they become that they talked about driving a two-and-a-quarter mile tunnel under the Pennines to connect the Wear Valley with Cumbria.

However, the tunnel idea remained a pipedream and it was not until the 1840s that the pioneers began to make the Weardale Railway a reality.

It started in November 1843 when the Bishop Auckland and Weardale Railway connected Shildon with Crook and coal flowed out of the Durham coalfield and down to the port at Stockton.

In August 1845, the S&DR got Parliamentary permission to spend £110,000 building a railway from the fifth milepost north of Bishop Auckland out to Frosterley. The line opened on August 3, 1847, with six stations:

Witton Park: opened in 1843 on the Bishop Auckland and Weardale Railway when it was called Etherley;

Wear Valley Junction: originally called Witton Junction on the Bishop Auckland and Weardale Railway;

Witton-le-Wear: the first station fully on the 1847 line, it had to be rebuilt in the 1880s as the original was on such a steep curve it was difficult to get the engines going again once they had stopped;

Harperley: initially it was just a halt serving the nobs in Harperley Hall, but when ganister clay was found nearby it was enlarged in 1892. It was said to be haunted by a ghost;

Wolsingham: railway directors had a boardroom upstairs in the station house;

Frosterley: the original terminus where the limestone rock could be seen emerging from the ground at the riverside.

In 1818, when the pioneers lit their pipedream, they estimated 5,000 tons of limestone would travel down the Wear Valley, mainly for agricultural use.

But by 1855, 250,000 tons were moving down the line because it had been found that the carboniferous limestone from the Frosterley district worked excellently as a flux in the iron-making blast furnaces of Teesside. Half-a-ton of it was required to make every ton of pig-iron.

A branchline ran off from Frosterley up the steep valley of Bollihope Burn to a gigantic quarry at Bishopley, but even this was not enough to satiate Teesside's furnaces. In 1861, the Frosterley and Stanhope Railway Company, which was owned by the S&DR, received Parliamentary permission to link the two towns and go in search of more limestone.

The link opened on October 22, 1862, and soon large quarries at Newlandside and Parson Byers were in operation near Stanhope. Parson Byers was so large that it had its own internal railway.

By the late 1860s, more than 500,000 tons of limestone was being removed from Weardale to Teesside where it kept going 30 ironworks with 150 blast furnaces.

The railwaymen wanted to push on further into the dale, and got Parliamentary permission in 1892. On October 21, 1895, they opened the Wear Valley Extension joining Stanhope to Wearhead with five new stations:

Stanhope: the 1862 station proved to be in the wrong place so a new one had to be built. It is now the headquarters of the Weardale Railway Trust, which will reopen the line. This weekend's steam festival is based around the station;

Eastgate: the track remains in place right up to Eastgate, which is now the end of the line;

Westgate: the trackbed and station remain and it is hoped one day to get trains running here again;

St John's Chapel: its station closed to goods in 1965 and was demolished and replaced with an industrial estate;

Wearhead: as no tunnel was built beneath the Pennines, it is the end of the line. It is 1,100ft above sea level and 22 miles from Wear Valley Junction.

More quarries now fed Teesside's voracious appetite - during the First World War, prisoners of war built the siding for quarry traffic up to Cambo Keels.

But during the 1920s, as iron production techniques changed, the demand for Weardale limestone slumped.

Now, the railway had reached the end of the line.

The last passenger service ran 50 years ago today; the last goods service in 1965, although from 1964 to 1993 Blue Circle's cement trade kept the line from Eastgate open.

Now, though, with the re-opening coming closer, the railway which created so many jobs in the 19th Century taking minerals out of the dale may create new jobs for the 21st Century carrying tourists in.