12:23pm Saturday 30th August 2008
By John Sheard
Ten years ago, I made regular business trips to Manchester where I was an editorial consultant for one of the largest PR companies in the North. I liked the work, but I hated the journey - because it was totally impractical to go by train.
From Skipton, I would have to travel south east to Leeds, change trains and then double back to the west. The fare, I seem to remember then, was £17.50 or so whereas I could do the journey by car for less than a tenner in petrol (those were the days!), but expense was not the bugbear. Depending on connections, it could take two-and-a-half hours by train - each way! Whereas by car, I could get from home to office in just under the hour. So, like thousands of people in our part of Yorkshire, I went west by car.
The reason for this was the some-say accidental closure of the Skipton-Colne railway link, for this vital east-west connection was never targeted under the infamous Dr Beeching closures of the 1960s. Instead, it was axed some years later as a Labour Government tried to cut runaway rail subsidies - and there are many people who feel it was closed because of a cartographer's cock-up.
The good news, however, is that this crucial link may soon be re-opened and one of the men responsible for that is well-known to hundreds of now middle-aged people who went to Aireville School in Skipton. He is former metal work teacher turned head of technology, Andy Shackleton.
Andy, 62, is the liaison officer of SELRAP - the Skipton-East Lancashire Rail Action Partnership - an amateur pressure group with a professional operation which believes it is on the finishing straight of a long race to re-open the line.
Andy is, as one would expect, a railway buff from the days when train spotting was a universal hobby for young boys. The son of a headmaster from Todmorden, he was brought up 200 yards from the railway line. In fact, when he could not get to sleep as a toddler, his dad would walk him down to the line to watch the trains go by. He was one of those rare youngsters who was good with both hands and head - but the hands won. He turned down a place at the local grammar school in favour of a technical school in Burnley, the sort of educational establishment we no longer have: it taught subjects like woodwork, metalwork and engineering drawing. In other words, skills that are in desperately short supply in this country today.
"They teach kids how to pass exams these days, not educate them in a way that will be useful in their later lives," he told me sadly at the 300-year-old farmhouse he and his wife Pam converted on the outskirts of Barnoldswick.
After college in Loughborough, he qualified as a crafts teacher and worked first in the leafy Cotswolds, then became head of department at a school in Nelson. They found the contrast hard to bear but, living in Foulridge, they became regulars at Skipton Swimming Pool - and he said that if a job ever came up next door at Aireville School, he would apply. That happy day came in 1974 and he stayed at Aireville until taking early retirement in 1997 to concentrate on his many hobbies, like running marathons, long-distance cycling - he has just published a book about a bike round Iceland! - and, of course, railways, both model and real life.
"I know Aireville gets a lot of stick these days, but those were extremely happy years for me, both with my colleagues and my pupils," Andy recalls enthusiastically. "Our curriculum was much wider then: Aireville pupils learned their skills by carrying out real projects, like building the gates and the bridge in The Ginnel in Skipton. My classes took several years to rebuild a broken down steam locomotive acquired from an engineering works in Manchester. That is still running on the Embsay private railway. That's something that those youngsters can be proud of to this day."
SELRAP came into being in the nick of time because plans were afoot to turn the old route into a road. Instead, the 330-member campaign has attracted enormous support with letters from 124 MPs, 39 MEPs, 46 members of the House of Lords and 130 councils from parishes to North Yorkshire and Lancashire county councils.
In the next few months, Andy is hoping to get Yorkshire Forward and the North West Development Agency on board and a Government go-ahead could be just round the corner. "We have won the battle for public opinion," he says. "Now we must ensure that we win the war."
I'll keep my fingers crossed on this, taking into account the parlous state of the public finances. But the Government has pledged more money for more trains and a better rail network as passenger numbers hit record levels. Let's hope that this will be one promise they keep.
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