Whitby Sights

Whitby - Pickering Railway

In 1965 the Whitby-Pickering Railway apparently perished under the Beeching axe. But on a sunny May day in 1973 the Duchess of Kent reopened the line as the North Yorkshire Moors Railway. Bells rang out in Whitby, and at Grosmont sightseers almost blocked the line as the Duchess boarded a ceremonial train to Pickering. The Whitby Gazette summed up the happy occasion:

The countryside through which the railway winds its way has never looked lovelier. One of the biggest track side crowds was at that favorite picnic area Moorgates where the line passes under the Goathland to Pickering road. At isolated Darnholm a Union Jack was stuck in the bankside, and the entire family of a single house at lonely Farwath turned out to wave to the Duchess .... If Whitby was charmed with the attractive petite Duchess, so was Pickering where the crowds seemed even larger than at Whitby . . .

This was not very different from the original opening of 1836 when a report noted that every part of the line where the public could have access to it, or where a view of the railway could be obtained was crowded with spectators . . . Many flags were exhibited and the most hearty cheers were given and returned by the bystanders and those in the coaches. On that occasion five bands played at Pickering, where 7,000 people turned out. And when the revelers returned to Whitby they celebrated at the Angel Inn from 5pm to 2am.

High feeling seems inseparable from the Whitby-Pickering Railway. When the line faced closure its supporters put up one of the country's staunchest fights to try and keep it alive. When restoration was proposed so much help was offered that by opening day the line boasted a preservation society with 9,000 members-the largest railway group of its kind in Britain. The enthusiasts had succeeded in restoring the longest stretch of standard-gauge railway (18 miles) then in the care of a voluntary group.

All this underlines the teeming history of the line. Its surveyor was George Stephenson, who came to it fresh from his triumphs with the Stockton and Darlington Railway and the Liverpool-Manchester Railway. Charles Dickens was once a passenger on the line, which he described as 'a quaint old railway along part of which passengers are hauled by a rope'-a reference to a 500yd incline at Beck Hole.

In 1864 special locomotives, nicknamed Whitby bogies, were built for the line. To cope with the exceptionally sharp curves of the track, their 2 pairs of bogie wheels were placed closer together than usual and set farther back under the boiler. Special coaches were also developed for the line. With 4 wheels instead of the usual 6 they became known as the Whitby Bathing Machines. Some ran direct to and from King's Cross, and W. A. Tuplin, a railway historian, has indicated their standard of comfort by observing that 'any passenger who traveled in one at high Great Northern speed from York to London might feel he needed another holiday immediately'.

The railway gave the world what is claimed to have been the first cheap-day excursion. For a fete at Grosmont in 1839, to raise money for a new Anglican church, the return fare from Whitby was reduced from 9d (4 1/2p) to 6d (2 1/2p), with corresponding reductions from Pickering. The church was completed in 1842 but soon became inadequate as Grosmont's population increased during the local ironstone boom. When the building was replaced by the present church in 1875, its east window was carefully transferred to the same position in the new church. It had been commissioned originally as a memorial to Henry Belcher, a Whitby solicitor who organized the historic fete. He also wrote a pioneer study of the Whitby-Pickering railway.

A 6-mile section of the railway, between Whitby and Grosmont, escaped closure in 1965. Used by trains operating British Rail's Esk Valley service, this is not part of the North Yorkshire Moors Railway, which nevertheless covers the much greater distance between Grosmont and Pickering. The train journey takes the visitor through the impressive gorge of Newton Dale, a trip that cannot be done by car. Today the still silent landscape is perhaps too much dominated by forestry, but there are still large areas of bracken and crag, where the grandeur of the dale, with its towering cliffs, is fully felt. The dale once contained farmhouses that must have been among the loneliest in Yorkshire. One stood below a large rock with a hole in it, just visible through trees from the train. An Eskdale farmer used to say that before the railway came his mother was 'born at t'Needle's Eye'. He told friends: 'If they lost their fire they went wi t 'warming pan ti t' neighbours en gat a bit o' live fire en carried it heame ti start afresh.'

The railway was promoted as a goods line. Materials transported in the early years included Grosmont ironstone, shipped from Whitby to Tyneside. Esk Valley whinstone also went via the railway to the port, some ending up in famous buildings such as Somerset House and Waterloo Bridge.

At first the line was a horse-tramway, and it was because Stephenson had engineered the line with only the horse in mind that the Whitby bogies were needed. At Grosmont the original stable block can be seen, while today's engine shed, open to visitors, is reached through the narrow castellated tunnel used by the horse-drawn trains. A small building next to the present Station Hotel was once the Tunnel Inn, and down in Newton Dale a house called the Grange, now a field centre, was fomerly the Raindale Inn-a changing post for the horses.

The most notable feature of the horse-worked line was the incline mentioned by Dickens. He travelled on the railway in 1844 to attend a friend's funeral in Malton, having stayed overnight at Mulgrave Castle. The carriages were uncoupled at the incline and a tank of water was released down the slope to haul them up. This system continued even when steam trains were introduced in 1846, but a 4-mile deviation, eliminating the incline, was opened in 1865. Today the abandoned track is available to walkers over most of its length, and the incline forms part of a particularly attractive stretch, between Goathland and Grosmont. The simple walk between these places, calling at the beautiful village of Beck Hole, can be conveniently combined with a ride in the opposite direction on a Moors Railway steam train.

The introduction of steam and the improvements to the track were due to George Hudson, immortalized as the Railway King through the number of schemes he promoted and controlled. It is also to Hudson, who acquired the Whitby-Pickering railway in 1845, that Whitby owes its development as a resort. Having linked the line for the first time to the wider rail network, Hudson bought Whitby West Fields, now the West Cliff. He arranged for the building of the Royal Hotel and the cliff road known as the Khyber Pass. When Hudson's empire collapsed in 1849 amid claims of embezzlement, Hudson's work at Whitby was continued by Sir George Elliot, a former Durham pit boy. Elliot built the Spa and is said to have lived in a house at the seaward end of Whitby's Crescent.

This century, the name to be written large in the history of the Whitby-Pickering railway is Tom Salmon, of Ruswarp. It was he who decided in 1967 that this famous railway should not die, although to many people it already seemed well and truly dead. Mr Salmon and a handful of supporters, many of them railwaymen or ex-railwaymen, formed a pilot group. For a time they were derided as 'the Crackpots', but the railway that they and their growing band of followers saved is now one of Yorkshire's most popular attractions. Together with George Stephenson, George Hudson and Charles Dickens, Tom Salmon, the local man, is worth a thought in any ride on the moorland railway.