The UK train that shouldn’t exist

Bela Moor is a lonely spot. From the gritstone crag at the moor’s summit, the fells of the Yorkshire Dales National Park billow out to all directions, their flanks fern-green and windswept. Located in northern England, the park has many focal points, but the remote moor is not one of them; save for the passage of a few hardy walkers, it sees little activity. The breeze blows cold up here.

One hundred and fifty metres underground, however, there’s a tale to be told. In the 1870s, a tunnel was built beneath the moor. It was as straight as an arrow, as dark as a mine and stretched for almost 1.5 miles. The gangs on the task used handpicks and dynamite to scrabble their way through the earth – an arduous, airless job that took them four years and required seven construction shafts to be sunk into the bedrock from above.

Fast forward to today and my train – a little three-carriage trundler with a cheery ticket inspector – is travelling through the same, hard-gained underpass. The Blea Moor Tunnel forms a key part of the 73-mile Settle-Carlisle Railway Line, which opened for passenger services in May 1876. The line is one of the most extraordinary stretches of rail track in the UK, partly due to the bleakly beautiful countryside it passes through, partly due to near closures in the 1960s and 1980s and partly due to the fact that it was ever built at all.

But right now, I’m on the move. Riding the train is akin to one of those immersive cinema screens that tugs your gaze left and right. Mountains rear up on both sides of the track, plunging again to reveal vast sun-patched valleys dotted with distant hamlets. The track crosses boggy plateaus and winds along tussocky slopes, with some 14 tunnels and 21 viaducts marking its way through the wild hills. On board, the aisle trolley sells branded Settle-Carlisle bookmarks and keyrings alongside cans of locally brewed beer. This is not a normal feature of the national rail network – but then the line’s construction was no standard feat.

“Your first thought is that (the terrain) is impenetrable even to the most skilful and daring engineer,” stated an editorial in the Sheffield Daily Telegraph newspaper a week before the line’s public launch. “The great Pennine Chain, the rocky steeps of Ingleborough, Wild Boar, Whernside and Shap Fells – these are not favourable to the construction of a Railway.” The 6,000 or so men employed to build the line – at least 72 of whom were killed in accidents or died during smallpox outbreaks in poorly sanitised work camps – would doubtless have agreed.

The line runs on a broadly south-north axis and is almost entirely rural, snaking from the Yorkshire market town of Settle to the Cumbrian city of Carlisle, which sits a short distance from the Scottish border – and therein lies the railway’s raison d’être.

Back in the 1860s, the Midland Railway Company was looking to snaffle a share of the lucrative cross-border rail trade to and from Scotland. The existing north-south lines, which travelled either side of the Pennine mountains, were run by rival companies who spurned Midland’s pleas for partnership. Midland, its pride dented, was left with one option: build a line through the hills.

The company applied for permission from Parliament in 1865 and was awarded the right to go ahead with the project. In an unforeseen twist, however, Midland had also succeeded in striking a deal to share one of its competitors’ lines. But the government, for reasons that we can be grateful for today, refused to let the company back out of the initial arrangement, effectively forcing Midland to embark on the hugely costly process of laying more than 70 miles of trackway through the region’s dipping, rearing contours.

BBC