Railway Days Out: A Visitor’s Guide To Britain’s Railway Heritage by Julian Holland A A Publishing, £12.99

The other Sunday night, too cold to venture out, we watched a couple of hour-long programmes about railway preservation groups.

One described how volunteers had rescued seven-and-a-half miles of the Tywyn Wharf to Nant Gwernol narrow gauge railway in North Wales, formerly used to transport slate from quarries.

That, I thought, was that. And then I opened Julian Holland’s railway guide and there on page 174 was the Talyllyn Railway Company: four colour photos of rolling stock, contact details and a concise summary of preservation story.

The other programme we watched featured a couple of preservation societies that had brought back into use locomotives on stretches of standard gauge track, in the Midlands and in West Yorkshire.

The latter, was of course, Keighley & Worth Valley Railway, and it features across two pages in Holland’s book (elsewhere are shorter references to Bradford Industrial Museum and Shipley Glen Tramway).

Of the K&WVR, the author states; “This was one of the earliest preserved standard gauge railways in Britain, reopened by a preservation society in 1967...

“The former Midland Railway branch from Keighley, on the main Leeds to Skipton line, to Oxenhope opened in 1867 to serve the large number of local mills along the valley, and was closed by British Rail in 1962.”

On the television programme Graham Mitchell, one of the volunteers who helped to restore the five miles of track, and Ann Cryer, retired Labour MP and wife of the late Bob Cryer MP, recalled the campaign to save the line and the feature film which did so much for railway preservation societies across the country.

Actress Jenny Agutter provided the voice-over, which was entirely appropriate because she was one of the young stars of the movie The Railway Children, filmed on the K&WVR. Both Bob Cryer and Graham Mitchell had cameo roles as train guards that hot summer at Oakworth station in 1970.

The book acknowledges that the line is also home to the Railway Museum at Oxenhope and the Vintage Carriage Trust at Ingrow. Between them they own 40 steam and diesel locomotives and nine historic railway carriages built between 1876 and 1950.

“Locos owned by the Trust include ‘Bellarophon’, built in 1874 by Haydock Foundry, and ‘Lord Mayor’, built in 1893 by Hudswell-Clarke,” Holland adds.

The preservation of railway artefacts and the publication of books such as this one, with 340 entries and 300 photographs, says much about the core decent-heartedness of the people of this country, I think.

What railway preservationists do is an affirming labour of love rather than labour for personal gain. Evidently the country has not gone to the dogs entirely.

And as Julian Holland points out, preserving the country’s railway heritage has a long tradition going back to 1857 when George and Robert Stephenson’s Locomotion No 1, built for the opening of the Stockton & Darlington Railway in 1825, was preserved at a workshop in Hopetown, Darlington.

Standard gauge steam locomotion, which inspired W H Auden and John Betjeman to poetry and Flanders and Swann to song, ended on British Railways in August 1968. But not for long.

By 2011, more than 350 steam and heritage diesel mainline railtours throughout the country took place. Sixteen of them are listed at the back of the book along with details of railway walks and cycle ways.