The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Travel
Railway stories with a happy ending
Disused train lines are being revitalised in great and creative ways, as Anthony Lambert reveals in a new book
Cycling the 93-mile (150km) Otago Central Rail Trail through the heart of New Zealand’s South Island was a revelation. Quite apart from the perfect pace to appreciate the landscape and the frequent stops to chat to people from a dozen countries, it made me realise how local activism can save an area on its beam ends. I met some of the women who had galvanised enough political and financial support to create a lifeline for local businesses – B&Bs, cafés, shops, even museums. So successful has the trail been in halting rural depopulation by attracting tourists to the region that it has become a paradigm for the rest of New Zealand and elsewhere.
I was there researching my new book, in which I set about exploring some of the world’s seriously scenic stretches of rail track that are no longer in use – but that can be experienced by bike (as in Otago), by car, by foot, or even on horseback. Each has its own charm and each its own story.
That there are so many disused rail tracks is hardly surprising: most countries have suffered their equivalent of Dr Beeching as railways built in the 19th century became uneconomic in the face of road competition. Thousands of miles of railway were closed before governments realised they could be part of the future as well as the past. Countless communities regret the closures, but the trackbeds and remaining railway structures exert a powerful hold on our imaginations.
If exploring old railways on foot sounds, er, borderline geeky, the ubertrendy New York High Line shows just how much potential closed railways have when reinvigorated well.
Closer to home, the recent Channel 5 series Walking Britain’s Lost Railways has shown how, for many people, tracing closed railways provides a walk with a purpose. No organisation in Britain has done more to utilise old railway lines than Sustrans through its creation of the National Cycle Network (NCN). Trackbeds provide terrain for cycling, with space even on a single-track formation and gentle enough gradients to attract those averse to hill climbing.
A significant part of the NCN’s 14,000 miles (or 22,530km) has been built on old railway lines and it was the NCN that inspired the women behind the Otago project. There have been similar successes in Germany, Spain and the United States, where the national Rails-to-Trails Conservancy (railstotrails.org) has adapted 302 miles (486km) of track bed in Colorado, 400 miles (644km) in Maine and 1,071 miles (1,724km) in Washington State alone. In London the unwisely closed branch between Finsbury Park and Alexandra Palace has become the capital’s longest nature reserve, a four-and-a-half-mile corridor for more than 200 species of wild flowers, 22 species of butterfly and a dozen types of tree.
The bringing back to life of some of these glorious lines adds a new layer to already complex histories, touching on characters behind their construction and how they were woven into the fabric of the communities they served in a way that is hard to imagine in our atomised world of individual transport.
Though written about a Yorkshire station, this description, taken from a 1965 Women’s Institute scrapbook at Robin Hood’s Bay, speaks volumes. “As people gathered to await the arrival of the train they would meet friends and inquire about the journey, the newsagent could be there, also the local fishmonger and the other tradesmen waiting to collect their wares from the train. In the event of a breakdown or bad weather, the wife of the stationmaster would bring tea.”
Sometimes a railway was dominated by one person. The Virginia & Truckee Railroad in Nevada was part of the gold and silver enterprises developed by William Sharon into vehicles of such wealth that it became one of the most profitable railways in the world. A Pennsylvanian Quaker, Percival Farquhar, completed the railway that probably cost more lives per mile than any other – the 228-mile (367km) MadeiraMamoré Railway, driven through the Amazon jungle to link the river with Bolivian rubber forests. Sections of both railways have retained operat- ing sections for tourists on account of their stories.
Successive British governments have lacked the foresight to safeguard the linear integrity of closed railways, often making reopening prohibitively costly or physically impossible. A rare exception has been the Borders Railway between Edinburgh and Tweedbank, which has helped boost tourism since its reopening in 2015 as well as exceeding its projected annual passenger numbers within seven months. Sir John Betjeman has been proved right when he predicted in 1963 that “railways are bound to be used again”. He just didn’t anticipate the many ways his forecast would be realised.
CALLANDER AND OBAN RAILWAY
Arguably Scotland’s most scenic closed railway, the Callander and Oban line ran through some of the loveliest glens of the Central Highlands. So admired was the line that most of the Caledonian Railway’s tours featured it, some using a Pullman observation car. Today one of the most dramatic sections, through Glen Ogle, is part of NCN 7 between Glasgow and Inverness, with the excitement of wheeling or walking over the 12 masonry arches of Glen Ogle Viaduct high above the valley that the railway’s manager