GWR 0-6-2T No. 5643 gets into its stride near Crakehall
hauling a DMU set on July 4, 2011.DAVE HEWITTRAILWAY
THE
Running through some of the best scenery North Yorkshire offers, the Wensleydale
Railway is a relative newcomer to the heritage and tourist railway sector.
Graeme Pickeringfinds out more about its growth and expansion plans.
A
train ride is undoubtedly the main
highlight of a trip to a heritage line,
but with railways increasingly trying
to cater for greater visitor expectations,
the journey itself is often just one aspect of the
visit. For the Wensleydale Railway (WR) in
North Yorkshire, the next stage of enhancing
that wider experience is the restoration of the
station building at its Leeming Bar headquarters,
for which it was awarded £368,000 from the
Heritage Lottery Fund earlier this year.
“People want more to do,” says Wensleydale
Railway general manager Richard Brown.
“They’re not just turning up at the train at the
time of departure, they’re turning up half an hour
earlier, they’re wanting to look around, they’re
wanting to see things, they’re wanting to touch,
be tactile with things. We’ve got to be able tostart capturing people’s attention. I think this is
in general for all heritage railways. It’s about that
experience of: ‘Oh yes, I got to do this and I got
to pick that up, then we had a train ride’. It can’t
be just about the train ride any more.”Country station
The WR’s heritage education programme,
which offers pupils up to 11 years old a school
visit to the railway, is now into its fourth year. It is
currently centred upon Scruton station, between
Leeming Bar and Northallerton, which was fully
restored from a derelict state in 2014. With the
help of volunteers dressed in period costume,
the station and a collection of artefacts is used
to cover several areas of the national curriculum
through group activities based on life at a country
station 100 years ago.Richard adds: “At present we do a small
schools’ engagement project, but we want to
expand that, and by getting the grant for Leeming
Bar that will enable us to enrich the experience for
the kids that are going to come. They can see a
station in one period, move down the line by train
to a station in another period.
“They’re seeing a bit of difference so they
can see how things used to be. It also means an
awful lot more to us than that. It’s not just about
just about solely education. It’s about starting to
re-create an experience for other passengers who
come. For instance, downstairs is all going to be
changed back into how it was originally. We’ve
managed to find the original drawings.
“The actual renovation work on the building
is scheduled to start in January. I think the first
phase is to replace the roof. We’ve got to doWENSLEYDALE
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