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.
![](https://e2e.bike/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/YR-Middleton-A-1024x929.jpg)
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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
![](https://e2e.bike/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/YR-Middleton-B-1024x496.jpg)
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.
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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.
![](https://e2e.bike/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/YR-Middleton-D-1024x660.jpg)
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.
![](https://e2e.bike/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/YR-Middleton-F-1024x742.jpg)
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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).
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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.
![](https://e2e.bike/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/YR-Middleton-L-1024x572.jpg)
I’d passed the brewery while doing the Painters Trail the other week. Clearly there was a subsconscious itch that had to be scratched.