On Saturday we undertook to go on as many of the lines in East and West Yorkshire that we hadn't been on before as possible. We started with a circular tour of East Yorkshire, by heading for Scarborough:
0941 York to Scarborough, arr 1030
Headcode: 1E63, operated by Transpennine Express using Desiro 185127
Distance: 42 miles; walk-up price: £9.75
It being a relatively nice Saturday in June (by which I mean it wasn't raining), the world and his wife seemed to have decided to go to the seaside. As such, our three-car train from York to Scarborough was pretty full, with Ian and I being lucky to get seats at all, and a number of people standing (at least to Malton).
However, most of the people on the train had got off at York; those going to Scarborough had mostly come from York (like us) or changed trains there. In fact, so many people were trying to get off and on at once that it might have been easier to have a separate train from York to Scarborough and force people to change, rather than running through services all the way from Liverpool.
Indeed, that may well happen soon: plans are afoot to electrify the north trans-Pennine route from Liverpool to York. Electric trans-Pennine services will run from Liverpool and Manchester to at least Newcastle and York; whether they will also serve Hull and Middlesbrough is yet to be decided, but the branch to Scarborough will probably remain unelectrified (at least for the time being) and so services will probably be reduced to a shuttle between York and Scarborough.
Even if it were, such a shuttle would be well-used: the line itself is a nice run, skirting the southern edges of the North Yorkshire Moors, and the principal destination - Scarborough - is still a prime tourist spot for beach-goers, seaside-lovers and arcade-game addicts alike. Unfortunately we only had an hour or so to spend there, but we had enough time to at least wander down to the beach and take a quick look around. We got one of the "cliff lift" tramways back up the hill and avoid the steep walk, before grabbing some lunch to eat later and heading back up to the train station for our next train to Hull:
1128 Scarborough to Hull, arr 1254
Headcode: 1J27, operated by Northern Rail using Sprinter 158908
Distance: 53.75 miles; walk-up price: £9.25
The line joining Scarborough to Hull - the only line contained entirely in East Yorkshire - is sometimes named the "Yorkshire Coast line". We couldn't quite see why: we caught a brief glimpse of the coast just north of Bridlington but otherwise the line was just far enough inland to put the coast out of sight, which is odd given that most of the places it links are coastal resorts, at least for the northern half of the line.
The train arrived at Scarborough as a two-car class 158 coupled to a one-car class 153, but the 153 was detached and left at Scarborough, presumably to strengthen a later train. Our two-car Sprinter seemed fine until Seamer, at which point the world and his wife had got off the next Scarborough train to head to Bridlington instead, forcing the guard to make an announcement that he wanted to see "bums, not bags, on seats"; however even then the train wasn't completely full.
A level crossing problem delayed us for for five minutes at Hunmanby, but thanks to various tricks of timetable planning we made up the deficit and arrived a couple of minutes early into Hull Paragon station. Paragon was once a huge station boasting 14 platforms; today its main shed holds only seven platforms, with one of the old platforms having been converted into a very long bus station (with 32 stands). With the addition of the bus station, however, came a full refurbishment and the whole station basks in the light from the roof.
Having had a quick look around, we headed for our third train of the day, this time back to York:
1312 Hull to York, arr 1427
Headcode: 2R98, operated by Northern Rail using Sprinter 158850
Distance: 52 miles; walk-up price: £12.95
While we tucked into our sandwiches, our train headed west out of Hull under the Humber Bridge towards Selby. Selby used to lie on the ECML proper until 1983, when subsidence from abandoned coalfields meant that the route via Selby could no longer be maintained without severe speed restrictions. Instead Selby now lies primarily on the east-west Leeds-Hull line, with two different routes now permitting trains to join the ECML heading north towards York.
On this train we took the route via Sherburn-in-Elmet, a lightly used station which sees occasional trains between York and Selby and two trains a day between Sheffield and York via Pontefract Baghill. On arrival at York, we got off the train, went to the toilet, walked up and down the platform a bit, and then got back on the very same train:
1447 York to Selby, arr 1506
Headcode: 2R11, operated by Northern Rail using Sprinter 158850
Distance: 17.75 miles; walk-up price: £4.35
Our train was going back to Hull by the other route: rather than going all the way via Sherburn-in-Elmet, this time the train uses the short connecting line at Hambleton Junction, where the Leeds-Selby line crosses the 1983 ECML diversion, and for the sake of completeness we decided to do both routes. Unfortunately we got held up slightly at Hambleton by a delayed eastbound TPE service to Hull, meaning we had to follow it into Selby, turning a tight five-minute connection to our westbound TPE to Leeds into a one-minute dash across the footbridge:
1511 Selby to Leeds, arr 1536
Headcode: 1K19, operated by Transpennine Express using Turbostar 170106+170104
Distance: 20.75 miles; walk-up price: £5.30
We made it. TPE's class 185 Desiros are too heavy for the line to Hull, so the services to and from Hull are still operated by class 170 Turbostars, which are only two carriages long. If you're unlucky and get one which is just two carriages it can be pretty full, but today we had two joined together and the four carriages were remarkably quiet, at least for the half-hour journey to Leeds.
Once in Leeds, our focus turned from East Yorkshire to West Yorkshire, specifically the network of lines between Leeds, Bradford, Shipley, Ilkley and Skipton which were electrified in 1994/95 as an add-on to the recently completed ECML electrification. We started by getting a Skipton train as far as Saltaire:
1556 Leeds to Saltaire, arr 1610
Headcode: 2H52, operated by Northern Rail using EMU 333011
Distance: 11.5 miles; walk-up price: £2.10
Saltaire is the first station north of Shipley, which is one of only two triangular stations in the country, in that it has platforms on all three sides of a triangle of railway lines (pub quiz question: name the other one!). We decided to go round all three sides of the triangle in full, thus passing through Shipley three times. The first was on the "main line" (which is the least curved of the three sides of the triangle, but still on a bit of a bend) to Skipton. After crossing the bridge at Saltaire, we headed back in the other direction, for the second side of the triangle:
1624 Saltaire to Bradford Forster Square, arr 1638
Headcode: 2S45, operated by Northern Rail using EMU 333004
Distance: 3.5 miles; walk-up price: £1.15
The Skipton-Bradford services use platform 5 at Shipley in both directions, thus making this side of the triangle the only one with only one platform and not two. So close to Shipley is Saltaire that the signal protecting the junction at the west end of Shipley - and telling the drivers which way they are going - is at the end of the platform at Saltaire! The run to Bradford's Forster Square station - one of two termini facing in opposite directions (the other being Interchange) that the Midland Railway planned to connect but never did - was short and uneventful; when our train arrived in Bradford we stayed on it to head back for the third side of the Shipley triangle:
1644 Bradford Forster Square to Ilkley, arr 1717
Headcode: 2D70, operated by Northern Rail using EMU 333004
Distance: 13.5 miles; walk-up price: £2.20
The final side of the Shipley triangle connects Bradford to Leeds. Immediately south of the triangle at Shipley, however, is a much larger triangle (a couple of miles wide rather than a few hundred yards wide) with the line to Ilkley; we'd already traversed the mainline to Skipton earlier, so this train got us the Shipley-Ilkley side of the triangle.
The line to Ilkley, generally known as the Wharfedale Line, is entirely within the metropolitan county of West Yorkshire. However, while its towns are suburban dormitory towns for Leeds and Bradford, they lie nestled in the southern tip of the Yorkshire Dales, and seem like the perfect place to commute from. After a quick walk from Ilkley station to Tesco to buy a drink and use the facilities, we headed back to Leeds to traverse the final side of the Ilkley triangle:
1740 Ilkley to Leeds, arr 1809
Headcode: 2V51, operated by Northern Rail using EMU 333014
Distance: 16.25 miles; walk-up price: £2.80
All four of our suburban trips on the West Yorkshire Electrics were provided by Class 333 electric multiple units built by Siemens in 2001. Unlike the cast-off Class 308 slam-door trains which were used as a stopgap after electrification in 1994, the class 333 units are modern, comfortable, and quick; admittedly they are somewhat spartan inside, but for the typical short commuter journeys they provide they are ideal. A pity that the same could not be said for our next train:
1829 Leeds to Harrogate, arr 1903
Headcode: 2C56, operated by Northern Rail using Pacers 142016+144007
Distance: 18.25 miles; walk-up price: £4.90
We headed north to Harrogate on the dreaded Pacer, the illegitimate love-child of British Rail and British Leyland buses which saved costs in the 1980s but fail to be comfortable, capacious or crashworthy in today's modern railway. The Leeds-Harrogate-York line is an obvious candidate for electrification - if it could be tacked on to a big project such as the trans-Pennine electrification it would probably cost very little - but currently remains unwired and often served by Pacers.
Harrogate itself, by complete contrast to the trains serving it, is a beautiful spa town which, in spite of its proximity to large cities like Leeds and York, manages to have facilities beyond its 70,000 population would appear to deserve, including, for example, a Wagamama in which we had dinner. With plenty of time before the last train back to York, we wandered around the town's parks before heading back to the station:
2105 Harrogate to York, arr 2148
Headcode: 2C66, operated by Northern Rail using Sprinters 150224+150103
Distance: 20.5 miles; walk-up price: £5.00
Mercifully, our final train home to York was not a Pacer but rather a pair of Sprinters; admittedly they had less legroom (being in 2+3 seating rather than 2+2) but they didn't jar us to pieces going over every joint in the track. After grabbing some breakfast for the morning, we headed to our hotel ready for a change of pace on Sunday: exploring Railfest 2012 at the National Railway Museum.
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