Colin's Presentation to SELRAP Members at the Meeting in Skipton on Monday 9th January
The moment of opportunity for the reopening of the Skipton-Colne line.
Thank you so much for the invitation to speak to you tonight.
I have watched with immense interest the progress SELRAP has made since 2001, emerging from a small team of dedicated lobbyists, who dreamt of restoring and rebuilding this short stretch of strategic railway line railway which even Dr Beeching didn’t want to close. In the early days we were ridiculed in the local press and by political leaders for our supposed naivety. But two decades later we are now desperately close to getting that critical DfT and Treasury green light, and maybe soon to the point, in that overused phrase, when we will see “spades in the ground.”
So let’s be optimistic. Within a decade the long sought for 11½ mile missing link could be rebuilt and restored and trains could be running once again between Skipton and Colne.
But let’s put that into perspective. In 1844 York Railway entrepreneur George Hudson and his North York and Midland Railway obtained Parliamentary powers to build a 42 mile railway between York and Scarborough. It was actually opened and carrying passengers from York intro Scarborough in a single year. On 7th July 1845 bunting was flying and brass bands playing, 42 miles build in a single year. We only dream of our 11½ miles by 2034. Progress?
What has happened to make even simple public civil engineering works, in the rich and powerful UK of 2024, so grotesquely expensive and glacially slow to achieve, even the simplest of projects?
No doubt people will argue that George Hudson and his contractors did work with minimal health and safety regulation. But I think the real answer is the huge, burdensome weight of bureaucracy that modern railways now carry, money which is sucked away into endless surveys, legal argument, assessments, feasibility studies, constantly subject to scrutiny and reassessment as costs continue to escalate into the stratosphere. Most of the payments to meet those costs find their way not into the struggling economies of East Lancashire and North and West Yorkshire, but into the pockets of consultants, lawyers, companies, shareholders and bureaucracies based- you have guessed it - in London or even abroad. George Hudson could do his own deals, sort out his contracts and get the job done – even if he did end up in gaol for fraud. But 180 years later Trans Pennine trains are still travelling along his railway track.
Why has rebuilding a short stretch of railway massively increased in cost and complexity, a process that has been taken away from the control by those who will use and benefit from the restored line?
The answer is clear in plain daylight and that is that in North of England we suffer from the two dead hands of DfT and the Treasury in what is now the most centralised state in western Europe. In this respect this reflects the post-colonial era perception within Whitehall that judges the English Regions in terms of being mere outposts of London, where all our dividends and revenues are sucked into, and all strategic decisions are made. If we had been in either Wales or Scotland this line would have reopened a decade ago.
In the North of England things are very different.
The Skipton-Colne line has become a high-profile symbol of the urgent need for English Devolution.