Commencing from Haworth on the Keighley & Worth Valley Railway line
Alan Dearling shares some images and a few words from a day out briefly touching shoulders with the Brontë -tourists, and then the Railway Children
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For a number of years I have been promising myself a trip on the famed Keighley & Worth Valley Railway (KWVR). It’s a steam and diesel railway line, brought back into use post British Rail line closures in 1962. A real labour of love fuelled by vast reservoirs of enthusiasm, funding efforts, and hard graft. Along with a number of steam and diesel engines, the Vintage Carriages Trust has also completely renovated and refurbished many stunning carriages. These make it very special and a collection of them is housed in the ‘Rail Story’ museum at Ingrow station.
Here’s a link to the Preservation Society who operate the line: https://www.facebook.com/WorthValleyRailway
I made at least part of the journey with my little Lumix pocket camera in hand. I’m definitely not an avid Brontë fan, nor an anorak-wearing steam train enthusiast. But, I am well into my bus-pass years and along with visiting friends, Oliver and Becky, was able to hop on the local B3 bus up the narrow, winding roads and moor-land up from Hebden Bridge to Haworth. Haworth station is located down in the Worth Valley below Haworth, which is almost the ‘ultimate’ quaint tourist village. Lots of cobbles, many olde-world shops, eateries and emporiums.
The station building at Haworth still retains and utilises gas lighting. I caught the whiff of the gas smell as soon as I entered the fairly cramped Ticket Hall. Haworth Station is one stop up line from the terminus at Oxenhope.
The Keighley & Worth Valley Railway is perhaps best known as a major location for ‘The Railway Children’, the 1968 BBC TV series, and the best remembered 1970 film of the tales from ‘The Railway Children’, starring Dinah Sheridan, Jenny Agutter, Sally Thomsett and Bernard Cribbins. Oakworth Station is featured throughout the feature film. Very recently in 2022, a sequel was released, ‘The Railway Children Return’. This was set in 1944. And once again this starred Jenny Agutter as ‘Bobbie’, but as a much older version of Roberta, alongside three new evacuee children. This sequel was actually written to describe the actual locations of the real-life Oakworth.
The author, Edith Nesbit wrote ‘The Railway Children’ (1905), which was first serialised in The London Magazine and published in book form in 1906. The BBC has produced (so far!) four versions of tales from the book, firstly in 1951. I think that version has been lost or misplaced. Carlton Television have also made their own adaptation into a film series in 2000. Jenny Agutter played the Mother in that one.
But the most famous TV version was aired in 1968 with Jenny Agutter as Roberta. Many contemporary viewers still regard the BBC version and the casting as superior to the more well-known film. Jenny also featured in that 1970 film version with Dinah Sheridan replacing Ann Castle as ‘Mother’. Lionel Jeffries had bought the film rights from the BBC after the 1968 adaptation and wrote the script for the 1970 film which he also directed. Lionel Jeffries used the Keighley & Worth Valley Railway as the backdrop for the film, which was depicted as in the book, as the ‘Great Northern and Southern Railway’. According to the publicity for the K&WVR, there are many local locations which were employed for various scenes. The house in Yorkshire where the mother and three children were relocated to was known as ‘Three Chimneys’, and the one used is in Oxenhope, just north of the railway station. The Nesbit book is filled with quaint characters such as the Old Gentleman and Perks, the station porter. Volunteers and staff at the K&WVR actively continue this character-acting tradition.
The Brontë Parsonage in Haworth was used as the location for Doctor Forrest’s surgery. Mytholmes Tunnel, near Haworth, and the railway line running through it were used extensively in the film, including being the location for the paper chase scene, as well as the famous landslide scene, in which the children wave the girls’ strips from their red petticoats in the air, as a warning to the train driver about the land-slip. The KWVR information informs us that the landslide sequence itself was filmed in a cutting on the Oakworth side of Mytholmes Tunnel and the fields of long grass, where the children waved to the trains, are situated on the Haworth side of the tunnel. A leaflet, ‘The Railway Children Walks’, is available from KWVR railway stations and the Haworth Tourist Information Centre.
The roll-call of TV and films which have utilised the Worth Railway, its train locomotives and carriages is prodigious. It includes, based on info from the KWVR: feature films such as Yanks (1979, Universal); Jude (1996, BBC Films): Fairy Tale: A True Story (1997, Icon Entertainment); Brideshead Revisited (2007, Ecosse Films), and Selfish Giant (2013); Another Brick in the Wall (Pink Floyd); Escape from the Dark (Disney); Swallows and Amazons (2016). One of the latest feature films shot on the KWVR is the cinematic adaptation of Vera Brittain’s iconic and powerful WW1 memoir, Testament of Youth, starring Alicia Vikander & Kit Harington, released at cinemas in January 2015. Robert Stephens was in Billy Wilder’s Private Lives of Sherlock Holmes (1970). The Great Train Robbery (2013 BBC); Spanish Flu – The Forgotten Fallen (2009, Hardy Pictures); The League of Gentlemen (BBC); Last of the Summer Wine (BBC); Housewife 49 (2006, Granada Television); A Touch of Frost (ITV Productions); The Royal (YTV); Some Mothers Do ‘Ave ‘Em (BBC); Born & Bred (BBC) and several period dramas including, The Way We Live Now (2001); Sons & Lovers (2003); and North & South (2004). At a personal level, growing up around the railway network of Southern Rail, the rolling stock, the steam, the smells were deeply evocative of old times and memories from my own youth, when smoking was allowed in the carriages, and tunnels meant carriages filled with smoke!
More recently, the railway was used as a location in the hugely successful BBC show, Peaky Blinders, with the railway scenes in Series 1 featuring Keighley and Damems stations, along with carriages from The Vintage Carriages Trust. September 2020 saw the railway feature heavily in the new adaptation of All Creatures Great and Small.
As a day-tripper, a tourist visiting the Keighley & Worth Valley Railway, the carriages, memorabilia – signs and posters and the extensive bookshop nearby Ingrow Station in the Engine Shed and the Carriage Works were probably the highlight of the whole trip, rather, perhaps, than the short journey along the five mile route of the railway.
During our visit, the link to Keighley Station was under renovation and that section of the journey from Ingrow to Keighley involved a trip on a vintage double-decker bus.
