T HE WENSLEY DALE RAILWAY
A train ride is undoubtedly the main highlight of a trip to a heritage line, but with railways increasingly trying to cater for greater visitor expectations, the journey itself is often just one aspect of the visit. For the Wensleydale Railway (WR) in North Yorkshire, the next stage of enhancing that wider experience is the restoration of the station building at its Leeming Bar headquarters, for which it was awarded £368,000 from the Heritage Lottery Fund earlier this year.
“People want more to do,” says Wensleydale Railway general manager Richard Brown. “They’re not just turning up at the train at the time of departure, they’re turning up half an hour earlier, they’re wanting to look around, they’re wanting to see things, they’re wanting to touch, be tactile with things. We’ve got to be able to start capturing people’s attention. I think this is in general for all heritage railways. It’s about that experience of: ‘Oh yes, I got to do this and I got to pick that up, then we had a train ride’. It can’t be just about the train ride any more.”
Country station
The WR’s heritage education programme, which offers pupils up to 11 years old a school visit to the railway, is now into its fourth year. It is currently centred upon Scruton station, between Leeming Bar and Northallerton, which was fully restored from a derelict state in 2014. With the help of volunteers dressed in period costume, the station and a collection of artefacts is used to cover several areas of the national curriculum through group activities based on life at a country station 100 years ago.
Richard adds: “At present we do a small schools’ engagement project, but we want to expand that, and by getting the grant for
