A new book brings to life dozens of ‘forgotten’ rail routes – including the old Easingwold Railway, reports STEPHEN LEWIS.

IN THE heyday of rail travel, before the car came to dominate our landscape, Britain was covered with a network of railway lines that reached to every part of the land.

Then along came Dr Beeching. Thousands of miles of track were lost, and more than 2,000 stations inherited from the Victorians were closed.

As a result, the landscape of Britain today is littered with the remains of abandoned railways. Rail timetables from the 1950s and 1960s are filled with tantalising glimpses of journeys on lines now lost or forgotten.

One such forgotten line is that which began as the Easingwold Railway in 1891, and which ran for less than three miles from Easingwold all the way to Alne.

The line – one of 36 lost or forgotten routes featured in antiques expert and railway lover Paul Atterbury’s new book Lost Railway Journeys – was a classic Victorian minor line, built at a time when the rail network seemed as though it would never stop expanding.

Easingwold in the late 19th century was a small market town with a population of about 2,000 – and some ambitious local businessmen who believed that trade could not develop properly without a railway that would connect the town to the busy main line of the North Eastern Railway at Alne.

They got together to raise £17,000, and the tiny line was completed in July 1891.

From the start, Paul writes, the Easingwold Railway was fiercely independent. “It owned its own locomotives, two small tank engines which continued to haul trains up and down the short line for much of its life.”

The Easingwold line survived the rail re-organisation of 1923, which saw the emergence of giant companies such as LNER, and in 1928, still independent, renamed itself the Easingwold Light Railway. Remarkably, it even escaped nationalisation in 1948 – “perhaps it was too small and insignificant to attract the attention of the Whitehall bureaucrats”, Paul writes – and continued hauling freight along its increasingly overgrown tracks until 1957.

More than 50 years later, there is no station remaining at Alne, and much of the route has been ploughed over. “On the approach to Easingwold, however, it is well defined, raised above the surrounding fields and partly hidden by bushes,” Paul writes. “New housing has now spread over the once extensive station site at Easingwold, but in the middle of this development, part of which is called Station Court, is the old station house.”

The Alne to Easingwold line is one of five ‘forgotten’ routes in the north of England that feature in Paul’s book. Others include the Derwent Valley Light Railway – still run by volunteers – and the Skipton to Grassington line.

But Paul also brings to life forgotten railway routes from across the country. “In some cases, the route survives, complete with viaducts and bridges, cuttings and embankments, tunnels and fragments of stations,” he writes. “All that is missing is the track and the trains. In others, it has all been swept away, leaving little to suggest the railway ever existed.”

Little, that is, except the telltale markings on Ordnance Survey maps. These are, Paul says, often the best place to start if you want to trace the route of one of these forgotten lines, and rediscover the time when the train, not the car, was king.

Paul Atterbury’s Lost Railway Journeys, by Paul Atterbury, is published by David and Charles, priced £15.99