8:54am Tuesday 31st August 2010
By Jim Greenhalf
Steam Around Leeds by Mike Hitches Amberley, £16.99
For me, the principal interest of Mike Hitches’s immaculately-produced book is the pictorial record of how things used to be – before Ernest Marples and Lord Beeching produced their report The Reshaping Of British Railways, which led to the closure of more than 2,000 stations and the axing of up to 5,000 route miles of track.
For example, there’s a half-page photograph taken in the late 1950s of a stationary train at what is now platform five at Shipley. Salts Mill chimney is in the background.
In the foreground, at the end of the concourse, is a signal box and what looks like an old gas lamp. In those days the station had four platforms. Over the page there’s an illustration depicting the layout of the tracks, signal boxes and sidings.
The section on Bradford and Halifax forms the longest of the six chapters. The capped initials of railway companies – the LB&HJR, GNR, L&YR, for example – stick out like barbed-wire obstacles to the general reader.
Not a problem for railway enthusiasts, just the reverse I suspect; a positive inducement to brew another mug of tea, adjust the reading lamp and settle down to reflect on the short-sightedness of politicians.
Politicians have three principal duties: to protect and defend the country; maintain food, money and medical supplies; and look after communications and travel infrastructure. Extensively dismantling the railways was always a dubious idea, carried out partly to weaken bolshie railway trade unions and benefit road-building contractors.
A map of the Midland Railway system around Bradford shows 28 stations, strung together like grapes on a vine, from Skipton to Queensbury, Ingrow East to Kirkstall Forge.
A dozen of them no longer exist, while the five stations from Oxenhope to Keighley form the Keighley and Worth Valley Railway, maintained and run by volunteers for tourists, holidaymakers, other railway enthusiasts and the occasional film company.
Pages 78 and 79 contain a quartet of photographs. The first shows extensive goods sidings that used to exist at Denholme. The second is a view of the Queensbury triangle, where the station at Queensbury served as the junction for lines to Bradford, Halifax and Keighley. The other two pictures show the stations of St Dunstan’s and Laisterdyke, neither of which now exist.
A graphic shows how well the area around Bradford was served; Bradford was looped with railways tracks, stations and goods yards. When private transport made inroads into passenger transport, rather than demolish the stations and remove the tracks, some of them should have been mothballed against the day when roads became jammed with lorries and cars.
The book leaves me to suppose that long-term thinking about railways wasn’t sexy in the mid-1950s and early 1960s, which was also the period when much of historic Bradford was destroyed, partly to make way for multi-lane roads through the city centre.
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