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Along Lost Lines by Paul Atterbury

Written by the Wanderlust Team

Friday, 25 January 2008

Our local railway lines survived until the 1950s and though great lengths of their trackbeds are still around to be seen, sadly there is very little public access to them in most of Ryedale. However, we often walk along the old Whitby to Scarborough route and on stretches from York into the Yorkshire Wolds and in North Yorkshire sometimes come across bits of old line, viaducts, old bridges or their remains and former railway houses in all sorts of places.

Close to where we live we have the famous North Yorkshire Moors Railway, officially closed in 1965 then reopened in 1968 and now running 100 days a year from Pickering to Grosmont and occasionally able to link once again to Whitby.

Paul Atterbury's latest book on the 10,000 miles of railways closed in the last 60 years takes a journey around the regions of the UK and is packed with old and new photos and information about timetables, the Beeching Report, stations and other buildings, tunnels, viaducts, different types of trains, liveries, name plates, signals, the staff, and freight from fruit to gunpower.

From the West Country section there's a spectacular track across Dartmoor, from Southern England "a particularly attractive railway walk is along the Meon valley in Hampshire", in Wales the old GWR mountain line from Blaenau Ffestniog towards Bala, in Central England "a typical late-Victorian iron trestle bridge survives, high above the river and its densely wooded banks" and in Tintern Station on the Wye Valley Walk there is a cafe and a museum. In East Anglia The Mid-Suffolk Light Railway "was cheaply built across farmland, so it was quickly and easily returned to that farmland after it closed" in 1952, and in Scotland the branch to Killin and Loch Tay "is a splendid path through the woods, with the occasional railway telegraph pole surviving".

Here, in the Northern England section we see a bridge near Kettleness which "survives to show that there was once a railway from Whitby to Redcar". "Nothing is more evocative of a long-lost railway than a handsome tunnel" says Atterbury and the one chosen is a neatly bricked up entrance at Burdale on the old Malton to Driffield line.

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