Riding the Settle to Carlisle Railway.

(The Times, July 20th 1996.)

Leeds must be the most ferro-centric city in Britain, if that's the mot juste for places big in railways. They don't let the grass grow between the lines here. It bustles as Crewe once did, the hub of a resuscitated railway system, busily shuttling trains to all points. People with a day on their hands who care to run a questing finger down the departures board, serendipitously seeking a destination, need progress no further through the alphabet than "C". Go to Carlisle, via Settle.

The following judgement transcends mere rail buffery. By any objective assessment this must be the most thrilling public transport experience in England, the daftest, most heroic achievement of the Victorian railway barons, a line driven through desolate mires, aslant howling moors and speared through the sinew of the Pennines. Perhaps overawed by the Wordsworthian stature of his subject, the publicity department's poet falls back on cheery doggerel for the station posters to speed you on your way - "You'll travel with a smile on the Leeds-Settle-Carlisle." It took 40 minutes for our nifty two-coach Super Sprinter, comfy high-backed seats in ochre and grey, to snake through the once grimy valleys, now shoulder-to-shoulder with smart new industrial units, to base camp at Settle in the Yorkshire Dales.

Here the train pauses as if to take stock of the endeavour ahead, while latecomers puff over the red lattice bridge. We set off from Settle up the steam engine fireman's bane, the Long Drag, 14 miles of unrelenting grind into the clouds. Even our sprightly diesel began to growl with the effort. For a time homely Yorkshire values prevailed - "Tea room 50 yards on the left" sirened a notice on an adjoining road. But slowly the abundant fields with their serpentine rivers give way to raw moorland.

Dent, at 1150 feet the highest station in England, was clamped under a Brontesque gloom even on an early spring morning. A lonely road wound into the glowering fells. I imagined the carts waiting at dusk ready to sweep Secret Garden heroines off to remote steadings. On under great peaks slashed with waterfalls, through tunnels necklaced with bayonets of ice, past stern grey rock faces. The petrified ribs of old snow screens recalled past Ice Ages. In 1947 a train was trapped up to its chimney for weeks. Here every type of snow is wrong. In extremis they switch to the "winter weather timetable", displayed in emergency red type on every platform. The Pennines conquered, we drift down through the ample Cumbrian foothills, through stations with stout Viking names like Langwathby and Lazonby and on into Carlisle.