The Settle–Carlisle Railway (S&C) is a 72-mile (116 km) long main railway line in northern England also known as the Settle and Carlisle and is a part of the National Rail network and was constructed in the 1870s. Apart from non permanent diversions,such as due to the closure of the West Coast Main Line, all passenger trains are operated by Northern Rail.
The line runs through remote and inaccessible regions of the Yorkshire Dales and the North Pennines, and is considered to be the most scenic railway in England. The drama of its history and construction mean that it is generally regarded as one of the symbols of Victorian enterprise and engineering.
The line runs from close to the town of Settle, starting at a junction with the line from Leeds to Morecambe, extending to the city of Carlisle close to the England/Scotland border. On the way the line passes through the town of Appleby-in-Westmorland together with a number of other small communities.
The S&C had its origins in railway politics; the expansion-minded Midland Railway company being locked in dispute with the rival London and North Western Railway over access rights to the latter’s tracks to Scotland.
The Midland board decided that the only solution was to start their own route to Scotland. Surveying started in 1865, and in June 1866, Parliamentary approval was given to the Midland’s plan. Soon after, however, the Overend-Gurney banking failure sparked a financial crisis in the UK, with interest rates rising sharply and several railways went bankrupt and the Midland's board, prompted by a shareholders' revolt, began to have second thoughts about a venture where the estimated cost was £2.3m. Resultantly, in April 1869, with no work yet started, the company petitioned Parliament to abandon the scheme it had earlier fought for. However Parliament, under pressure from other railways which would benefit from the scheme but which would cost them nothing, refused, and construction started in November of that year.
The line was built by over 6,000 navvies, mechanical diggers had not yet been invented, who toiled in some of the worst weather conditions England can provide. Huge camps were established to house the navvies, many of whom were Irish. The Midland Railway helped pay for scripture readers to balance the effect of drunken violence in isolated neighbourhoods. The camps were complete townships with post offices and schools and had names such as Inkerman, Sebastapol and Jericho. The remains of one of these camps, Batty Green, where over 2,000 navvies lived and worked, can be seen at nearby Ribblehead.
A plaque in the church at nearby Chapel-le-Dale records the workers who died both from disease and accidents, constructing the railway. The death toll is not actually known but 80 people died at Batty Green alone following a smallpox epidemic.
A memorial stone was laid in 1997 in the churchyard of St Mary's Church, Mallerstang to commemorate the 25 railway builders and their families who died during the building of this section of the line, and who were laid to rest there in unmarked graves.
The chief engineer for the project was John Crossley, a Leicestershire man who was a veteran of many other major Midland schemes.
The terrain crossed is some of the bleakest and wildest in England, and building was halted for months at a time due to frozen ground, snowdrifts and flooding of the works. One contractor had to give up as a result of completely underestimating the terrain and the weather, Dent Head for example has almost four times the rainfall of London.
The line was engineered to express standards throughout, local traffic was of secondary importance and many stations were miles from the villages they purported to serve. It peaks at a summit of 1,169 feet (356 m) at Ais Gill, north of Garsdale. To keep the gradients down to no steeper 1 in 100 (1%), a requirement for fast running using steam traction, massive engineering works were required and even then the terrain imposed a 16-mile (26 km) climb from Settle to Blea Moor, almost all of it at 1 in 100, and known to enginemen all over as ‘the long drag.’.
Even then, 14 tunnels and 22 viaducts were required, the most notable being the 24 arch Ribblehead Viaduct which is 104 ft (32 m) high and 440 yards (402 m) long. The swampy ground meant that the piers had to be sunk 25 ft (8 m) below the peat and set in concrete in order to ensure a suitable foundation was provided.
Soon after the crossing of the viaduct, the line enters Blea Moor tunnel, 2,629 yd (2,404 m) long and 500 ft (152 m) below the moor, before emerging in to the open again on to Dent Head viaduct. The summit at Ais Gill is still the highest point reached by main line trains anywhere in England.
To maintain speed requirements, water troughs were laid between the tracks at Garsdale so that steam engines could take water without reducing speed.
The line was opened for freight traffic in August 1875 with the first passenger trains starting in April 1876. The cost of the line at the end was £3.6 million, 50 per cent over budget and a huge sum for the time.
For a period of time the Midland set the pace for London-Glasgow traffic, actually providing more daytime trains than its rival. But in 1923 The Midland was merged with the London Midland & Scottish Railway, with the LNWR also forming part of the new company. In the consolidated company, the disadvantages of the Midland’s route were clear, its steeper gradients and greater length meant it could not compete on a speed basis from London to Glasgow, especially as Midland route trains had to make more stops to serve major cities in the Midlands and Yorkshire.
The Midland had long competed on the extra comfort it provided its passengers but this advantage became lost in the newly merged company.
After nationalisation of the railways in 1948, the pace of rundown quickened. It was regarded as a duplicate line, and control over the London-Glasgow route was split over several regions which made it hard to properly plan popular through services. Mining subsidence also severely disrupted speeds through the East Midlands and Yorkshire. In 1962, for example, the Thames-Clyde Express travelling via the S&C took almost nine hours from London to Glasgow, compared to the West Coast main Line where the journey length was 7 hours 20 minutes.
In the 1963 Beeching Report into the restructuring of British Rail it was recommended that all passenger services from the line be withdrawn. Some smaller stations had in fact already closed in the 1950s. The Beeching recommendations for the line were shelved, but in May 1970 all stations except for Settle and Appleby West were shut, and its passenger service cut to just two a day in each direction, leaving only freight.
A mere handful of express passenger services continued to operate, The Waverley from London St Pancras to Edinburgh Waverley via Nottingham ended in 1968, while the more important Thames-Clyde Express from London to Glasgow Central via Leicester, lasted until 1975. Night sleepers from London to Glasgow continued on until 1976 however. After that a residual service from Glasgow , cut back at Nottingham with three trains each way and survived until May 1982.
All through the 1970s, the S&C suffered a blight of investment, and most freight traffic was diverted onto the West Coast Main Line which had been electrified, to Glasgow in 1975. Because of the lack of investment the condition of many of the viaducts and tunnels on the line deteriorated. The only positive news came from the Dalesrail services operating to closed stations on summer weekends since 1974. These were marketed by the Yorkshire Dales National Park Authority to encourage ramblers to arrive in the area by train.
In the early 80s, the S&C was carrying only a handful of trains per day, and British Rail decided that the cost of renewing the viaducts and tunnels would be prohibitively expensive, given the small amount of traffic generated on the line. In 1981 a protest group, the Friends of the Settle-Carlisle Line (FoSCL), was established, and this group campaigned extensively against the line's closure even before it was officially announced.
In 1984 closure notices were erected at the S&C's remaining stations. However, local authorities and rail enthusiasts alike joined together and started a campaign to save the S&C, pointing out that British Rail was ignoring the S&C's potential for tourism, ignoring the need to a diversionary route to the West Coast main line and in addition failing to promote through traffic from the Midlands and Yorkshire to Scotland.
There was outrage over the closure plan, critics pointing out that this was a main line, not a small branch railway. The campaign uncovered compelling evidence that British Rail had mounted a dirty tricks campaign against the line, exaggerating the cost of repairs, £6 million for Ribblehead Viaduct alone and deliberately diverting traffic from the line in order to justify its closure plans, a process referred to as closure by stealth.
Ironically, the publicity over British Rail's tactics succeeded in a massive increase in traffic. Journeys per year were 93,000 in 1983 when the campaign to save the line began and rose to 450,000 by 1989. As a result of the campaign, the Government finally refused consent to close the line in 1989, and British Rail began the repair of the deteriorating tunnels and viaducts.
As a result the S&C is probably busier now than at any time in its history. In recent years, due to congestion on the West Coast Main Line, much freight traffic is reverting to the S&C once again, especially coal from the Hunterston coal terminal in Scotland travelling to power stations in Yorkshire. Major engineering work has been needed to bring the line up to the standards required for such heavy freight traffic and further investment is needed to reduce the length between signal boxes. Local passenger traffic has increased, with eight of the minor stations closed in 1970 being re-opened in 1986. Ribblehead station has a special visitor centre. The line continues as an important diversionary route from the West Coast Main Line during engineering works, though as it is unelectrified, unlike the West Coast Main Line, electric trains such as Pendolinos need to be pulled by a diesel locomotive along that section.
Anglo-Scottish expresses have not been fully restored however. The former regional franchisee Arriva Trains Northern initiated a twice daily Leeds to Glasgow Central service in 1999, calling at Settle, Appleby, Carlisle, Lockerbie and Motherwell, but this was withdrawn at the request of the Strategic Rail Authority in 2003, and there remains no link from Yorkshire or the East Midlands to Glasgow over the line, and the link from Lancashire operates on Sunday only for the benefit of ramblers under the DalesRail brand.
