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Middleton: Steamy experience at world’s oldest railway

Posted on 10 April 202311 April 2023 by Rob Ainsley

Yorkshire is a country – sorry, county – of superlatives. Of stuff that matters, anyway. The best beer, finest scenery, tallest people, most interesting phone boxes, oldest and highest pub. And – I was delighted to learn – the World’s Oldest Working Railway.

Geroge Stephenson? He weren’t even BORN when t’trains started here.

Because in Hunslet, a suburb of Leeds, there’s been a train running on the Middleton Railway line since 1758. Slowly.

Yes, 1758: it serviced the local mine decades before the passenger-railway boom of the mid-1800s, and is now a volunteer-run heritage railway (Britain has well over a hundred) offering scheduled rides to the public. So today I took advantage of the £2 flat fare scheme to take a bus to Leeds with my folder, and have look.

Platform 1 at Moor Road station. Only platform at Moor Road station.

The Middleton line branches off the main line at Hunslet, one stop south of Leeds’s main station. To get there from the bus terminus involved some pretty decent shared-use and segregated cycle paths that the city is installing.

Sorry, drivers: Only buses, taxis and bikes can now use Leeds Bridge. Actually not sorry. Ha ha. Ha ha ha ha. Ha.

A driver stuck in traffic in the Netherlands looks at cyclists whizzing past them on bike lanes and wishes that they, too, had decided to cycle instead of taking the car. A driver stuck in traffic in Britain looks at cyclists whizzing past them on bike lanes and wishes that the cyclists, too, were stuck in a car like them.

You build these roads, then cars don’t even bother to use them: Super new segregated cycle infra south of Leeds Bridge

Many are impressive – by British standards, I mean; in the Netherlands they wouldn’t cut the mayo, never mind the mustard – and I’m afraid they put my home town of York to shame.

Shed light: Middleton Railway museum

Anyway, after a couple of car-free miles, I was at Middleton’s station, Moor Road, in time to see their final departure of the Easter weekend.

In loco parentis: Family-friendly Middleton Railway museum

There’s a cafe and free museum full of locos, and some volunteers were doing spannery things on a steam engine that was shuffling a satisfying cumulus of vapour.

There’s no ‘I’ in ‘steam’: Volunteer teamwork at Middleton Railway

Having snapped the world’s oldest continuously operating service as it passed my lineside cranny, I tried to follow it to the only stop on the line – Park Halt, barely a mile south. Being slow, wheezing, ancient and high-maintenance, of course I didn’t manage to keep up with it.

Faster than a speeding, er, slow cyclist
With only one stop to go to…
…it makes the timetable nice and simple

However, I did take the opportunity to look round Middleton Park, which adjoins Park Halt. It’s a very pleasant and picnickable, with a pond-sized lake, table tennis tables, and some good tarmac paths for cycling round (one evidently along an old raised wagonway).

Woody and buzz: Cyclable track in Middleton Park

The park’s Visitor Centre cafe was closed, so no chance of coffee or chocolate. So I headed back to the city centre hassle-free along the cycle path network and found something to drink that tasted satisfyingly of both: a pint of Nethergate’s Umbel Magna in Leeds station Wetherspoon.

Middleton Park Lake: Hmm, some of the puddles on the cycle paths today were bigger than this

I’d passed the brewery while doing the Painters Trail the other week. Clearly there was a subsconscious itch that had to be scratched.

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