Why doesn't Ripon have a train line towards Harrogate or York?

[Djgr]

Unfortunately Dr Morgan completely failed to raise much consistent support among the local populace, so much so that North Yorkshire Council eventually dropped all mention of the idea from their long-term transport plan citing that lack of local support.

While the parallel bus service is necessarily slower than a rail service would be, it does at least serve a number of communities along the way, something that the railway didn't, and wouldn't, do.

Railways are big ticket items, expensive to build and expensive to operate. Since they have to be paid for somehow they only make sense when they are reasonably well used especially when considering (re)building a former route. In that sense Ripon is pretty much a no-hoper.

If more public funding was available, a lot could be achieved by improving the local bus network but even then the potential userbase is relatively small.

The biggest surprise to me is that North Yorkshire has a transport plan!

 

[SuspectUsual]

The biggest surprise to me is that North Yorkshire has a transport plan!

It's really simple. One page, "buy a car" in big letters

 

[RT4038]

It's really simple. One page, "buy a car" in big letters

i.e. what the vast majority of residents want.

 

[Killingworth]

It was sad to see the demise of branch line railways, something that was increasingly inevitable as the 20th Century progressed.

In 1900 most freight moved by rail, except round the coasts. Like hundreds of stations Ripon's heydays will have been before WW1 but largely unappreciated until after WW2. People like Beeching, Marples and Serpel are blamed for the losses but they were increasingly inevitable as we craved the independence and flexibility of our own cars. Alongside that army surplus trucks after WW1 and WW2, with many former services drivers to drive them took wagon load freight, far more flexible than shunting railway trucks around the country.

It's a miracle so much railway has survived. Very substantial parts of it are basically still as built in Victorian times and need large amounts of capital expenditure just to keep them running at all. Diverting multi millions, collectively billions, into reopening lines to places like Ripon make minimal business sense.

We can't electrify what tracks we still have to places like Swansea, Bristol, Sheffield, Nottingham and Hull. Old embankments, cuttings and tunnels need constant attention - and all that vegetation growing where it shouldn't!

The Beeching/Serpell era didn't just close branch lines. It lead to removal of surplus track mileage to reduce maintenance costs. No doubt most were good ideas at the time. I suspect many older readers will recall bits that were removed near them that would be useful to have replaced today - and more use to the modern network than little branch lines.

My favourite restoration would be to restore 4 tracks fom Dore into Sheffield. The original 2 were quadrupled in 1904 but by the 1970s they'd been reduced back to 2, those tracks slewed and bridge spans removed. Those 2 are now a bottleneck causing hold ups to services from Edinburgh to Penzance, Liverpool to Norwich and knock-on impacts across the nation. Will it happen? No. Even a bi-directional 3rd track with some effective 4 track sections for loops may not happen - or reconfiguring Sheffield station to increase capacity.

There isn't the money to provide enough rolling stock for the services we have now on the their current congested paths to justify building a a new line to Ripon. Certainly not with frequent services to compete with buses that get nearer to where more people want to go, albeit more slowly.

 

[yorksrob]

The closure programme in the 1960's was, and continues to be a national bane.

Up until the late 1960's there was no attempt to make economies. The only recognised justification for objecting to a closure in law was the rather woolly concept of "hardship" which could be overturned by the Minister at the drop of a hat.

Be ever vigilant. Sadly there's always a threat, even to today's moth-eaten network.

 

[yoyothehobo]

It was sad to see the demise of branch line railways, something that was increasingly inevitable as the 20th Century progressed.

In 1900 most freight moved by rail, except round the coasts. Like hundreds of stations Ripon's heydays will have been before WW1 but largely unappreciated until after WW2. People like Beeching, Marples and Serpel are blamed for the losses but they were increasingly inevitable as we craved the independence and flexibility of our own cars. Alongside that army surplus trucks after WW1 and WW2, with many former services drivers to drive them took wagon load freight, far more flexible than shunting railway trucks around the country.

It's a miracle so much railway has survived. Very substantial parts of it are basically still as built in Victorian times and need large amounts of capital expenditure just to keep them running at all. Diverting multi millions, collectively billions, into reopening lines to places like Ripon make minimal business sense.

We can't electrify what tracks we still have to places like Swansea, Bristol, Sheffield, Nottingham and Hull. Old embankments, cuttings and tunnels need constant attention - and all that vegetation growing where it shouldn't!

The Beeching/Serpell era didn't just close branch lines. It lead to removal of surplus track mileage to reduce maintenance costs. No doubt most were good ideas at the time. I suspect many older readers will recall bits that were removed near them that would be useful to have replaced today - and more use to the modern network than little branch lines.

My favourite restoration would be to restore 4 tracks fom Dore into Sheffield. The original 2 were quadrupled in 1904 but by the 1970s they'd been reduced back to 2, those tracks slewed and bridge spans removed. Those 2 are now a bottleneck causing hold ups to services from Edinburgh to Penzance, Liverpool to Norwich and knock-on impacts across the nation. Will it happen? No. Even a bi-directional 3rd track with some effective 4 track sections for loops may not happen - or reconfiguring Sheffield station to increase capacity.

There isn't the money to provide enough rolling stock for the services we have now on the their current congested paths to justify building a a new line to Ripon. Certainly not with frequent services to compete with buses that get nearer to where more people want to go, albeit more slowly.

This 100%, we would likely have a lot more railway, with marginally more income and a lot more cost.

If the network had limped past the 60s, would it make it beyond the 70s? the 80s? the 90s? Cars and trucks became a lot better in that time period as did roads. That was the way of the world, the same way people moved away from the canal to the railway. They dont expect there to be a need to go back. We are also at a point in the existence of a lot of the earthworks in that they are massively life expired. The railway has a finite budget to deal with a lot of problematic assets and the coming years will require hard decisions for routes to be made looking at the effect of climate change.

The closure programme in the 1960's was, and continues to be a national bane.

Up until the late 1960's there was no attempt to make economies. The only recognised justification for objecting to a closure in law was the rather woolly concept of "hardship" which could be overturned by the Minister at the drop of a hat.

Be ever vigilant. Sadly there's always a threat, even to today's moth-eaten network.

No, it is self flagellation for rail enthusiasts who refuse to acknowledge the real world and who think the railway of the 1960s was ever imperfect or inefficient or was ever going to change.

 

[yorksrob]

This 100%, we would likely have a lot more railway, with marginally more income and a lot more cost.

If the network had limped past the 60s, would it make it beyond the 70s? the 80s? the 90s? Cars and trucks became a lot better in that time period as did roads. That was the way of the world, the same way people moved away from the canal to the railway. They dont expect there to be a need to go back. We are also at a point in the existence of a lot of the earthworks in that they are massively life expired. The railway has a finite budget to deal with a lot of problematic assets and the coming years will require hard decisions for routes to be made looking at the effect of climate change.


No, it is self flagellation for rail enthusiasts who refuse to acknowledge the real world and who think the railway of the 1960s was ever imperfect or inefficient or was ever going to change.

Absolute nonsense.

A read of Beeching's own re-shaping report shows that routes such as York - Beverley could have been made to cover their costs through rationalisation.

That this wasn't considered was entirely a political choice by Beeching/Marples/Fraser etc.

 

[NCT]

This 100%, we would likely have a lot more railway, with marginally more income and a lot more cost.

If the network had limped past the 60s, would it make it beyond the 70s? the 80s? the 90s? Cars and trucks became a lot better in that time period as did roads. That was the way of the world, the same way people moved away from the canal to the railway. They dont expect there to be a need to go back. We are also at a point in the existence of a lot of the earthworks in that they are massively life expired. The railway has a finite budget to deal with a lot of problematic assets and the coming years will require hard decisions for routes to be made looking at the effect of climate change.


No, it is self flagellation for rail enthusiasts who refuse to acknowledge the real world and who think the railway of the 1960s was ever imperfect or inefficient or was ever going to change.

Absolutely correct.

Absolute nonsense.

A read of Beeching's own re-shaping report shows that routes such as York - Beverley could have been made to cover their costs through rationalisation.

That this wasn't considered was entirely a political choice by Beeching/Marples/Fraser etc.

All other European countries had Beeching equivalents. A cursory glance on Openrailwaymap will show Britain's experience was nothing out of the ordinary.

 

[yorksrob]

Absolutely correct.



All other European countries had Beeching equivalents. A cursory glance on Openrailwaymap will show Britain's experience was nothing out of the ordinary.

We're not beholden to foreign countries experiences.

There were many initiatives to rationalise secondary routes later on in the 1960's/70's - East Suffolk, Marshlink etc.

That these weren't tried earlier was a political choice. Remember, Dr Beeching was a more hawkish member of the Stedeford committee who was chosen by the dodgy Marples to reshape the railway to his requirements.

As I say, it was a political choice.

The labour Government in 1964 won on a manifesto on reviewing the Beeching cuts. It did this eventually, albeit far too little, too late.

 

[NCT]

We're not beholden to foreign countries experiences.

The UK doesn't exist in a vacuum.

 

[yorksrob]

The UK doesn't exist in a vacuum.

It doesn't, but we have (and had in the 1960's) the ability to decide our transport policy.

 

[NCT]

It doesn't, but we have (and had in the 1960's) the ability to decide our transport policy.

Every European country was subjected to the same macroeconomic changes. That everyone went through the same experience suggests either we were all right or we were all wrong.

 

[Dr Hoo]

Absolute nonsense.

A read of Beeching's own re-shaping report shows that routes such as York - Beverley could have been made to cover their costs through rationalisation.

That this wasn't considered was entirely a political choice by Beeching/Marples/Fraser etc.

Please ‘show your workings’ in relation to York-Beverley. Bear in mind that it had loads of level crossings that hadn’t been modernised.

In fairness to Ernest Marples and Dr B it’s worth noting that Automatic Half Barriers were rolled out during their tenure (but largely on lines that had better prospects).

 

[yorksrob]

Please ‘show your workings’ in relation to York-Beverley. Bear in mind that it had loads of level crossings that hadn’t been modernised.

In fairness to Ernest Marples and Dr B it’s worth noting that Automatic Half Barriers were rolled out during their tenure (but largely on lines that had better prospects).

I did that about fifteen years ago on this forum. The workings are there to see in the report.

Automatic crossings were apparently rolled out to York - Beverly aswell, but they were never installed due to Beeching.

 

[HSTEd]

I agree that some routes could have been saved by resort to early rationalisation. As an example, probably big chunks of the GCML could have been saved by two car Derby lightweights and paytrain.

Even leaving aside whether the unions will wear such rationalisation before the trauma of Beeching showed them the alternative...... given that incomes were still falling at the time of the Beeching report, it seems unlikely that very much more would have survived into the modern era.

Income kept bottoming out well into the 1980s, just because it could cover its costs in 1964 does not mean it will do so in 1974 or 1984. A sprawling mass of tracks haemorrhaging money into the 1980s is just going to get a Serpell report that looks like Beeching at best. The sacrifices of the Beeching report saved a hard core of the railway that was better able to navigate the political-economic challenges of the 1970s and 1980s.

 

[yorksrob]

I agree that some routes could have been saved by resort to early rationalisation. As an example, probably big chunks of the GCML could have been saved by two car Derby lightweights and paytrain.

But given that incomes were still falling at the time of the Beeching report, it seems unlikely that very much more would have survived into the modern era.

Income kept bottoming out well into the 1990s, just because it could cover its costs in 1964 does not mean it will do so in 1974 or 1984. A sprawling mass of tracks haemorrhaging money into the 1980s is just going to get a Serpell report that looks like Beeching at best. The sacrifices of the Beeching report saved a hard core of the railway that was better able to navigate the political-economic challenges of the 1970s and 1980s.

Or it could be said that politically cuts to 1980's network were due to political and transport necessities during the 1980's.

Had a larger network made it through to the 1980's, those same political and transport necessities would have had the same proportional effect on the larger network, leading to a larger overall network than that left from the disastrous Beeching programme.

 

[Killingworth]

But we are now in 2026, heading towards the 2030s. Whatever the riights and wrongs of the 1950-90s period that's gone, as has 2000-25.

Nostalgia is only constructive if it channels past experience in conjunction with realistic examination of where we are going now, and how.

The Elizabeth line is a success but it cost a lot. Will the TRU be seen in a similar light once complete? But I digress. Ripon is a diversion of effort and attention from more boring and mundane projects with greater benefits for the future railway network.

 

[Dr Hoo]

I did that about fifteen years ago on this forum. The workings are there to see in the report.

Automatic crossings were apparently rolled out to York - Beverly aswell, but they were never installed due to Beeching.

The Reshaping Report analysis concluded that the ‘financial improvement’ was ‘over half of the total direct expenses’ (Page 99)! Worth bearing in mind that the irregular York-Hull service tied up no fewer than than four units+crews during the morning shift. Meanwhile the increase in car ownership and changes in holidaying habits were continuing to leech away at the revenue base.

Although the route had at one stage been seen as a pilot scheme for Centralised Traffic Control I’ve never seen any serious evidence that the project was actually being implemented (apart from delivery of generic components such as cable troughing).

I have never heard that there was a ‘rollout’ of automatic crossings. Source, please.

Meanwhile, back at Ripon, this was another case where a superficially attractive peak service but an appalling off-peak one also tied up multiple sets of resources at some times of day.

 

[Bahnopa]

I did that about fifteen years ago on this forum. The workings are there to see in the report.

Automatic crossings were apparently rolled out to York - Beverly aswell, but they were never installed due to Beeching.

The only crossing on the York-Beverley route that was actually modernised was at Warthill (aka Stockton on the Forest) which received lifting barriers and traffic lights worked from the signal box. Photo from the book 'Hudson's Way' by Stephen Chapman.

 

[Killingworth]

.).).The only crossing on the York-Beverley route that was actually modernised was at Warthill (aka Stockton on the Forest) which received lifting barriers and traffic lights worked from the signal box. Photo from the book 'Hudson's Way' by Stephen Chapman.
View attachment 210539

York - Market Weighton - Beverley - Hull was largely on flat land and had a lot of crossings but of all the closures it must have been one of the least justified, but it did close in 1965. I used Market Weighton station at least once before then and had probably changed there for a train towards Driffield when visiting relatives in a nearby village with my father. (That line closed for stopping trains in 1954.) Well before 1965 my aunt got a car and I suspect collecting me from York was a good excuse to go shopping and to Betty's or Terry's cafes to meet friends. On the return journey I'd be happy to visit the old railway museum. It was a different world.

I love OS maps. I've tried to walk as close as possible to the route from York to Beverley. You can't use the old track alignment. There'd need to be a significant amount of totally new routing but at least it connects two cities and passes some significant towns. But electrifying the routes into Hull might be better use of any money available for East Yorkshire.

Again I come back to the fundamental point that we're better reinforcing the operational bits of the railway than throwing scarce funding at additional lines to add yet more pressure to already stretched budgets. And that includes diversion of efforts into many all but hopeless costly feasibility studies!

 

[yorksrob]

But we are now in 2026, heading towards the 2030s. Whatever the riights and wrongs of the 1950-90s period that's gone, as has 2000-25.

Nostalgia is only constructive if it channels past experience in conjunction with realistic examination of where we are going now, and how.

The Elizabeth line is a success but it cost a lot. Will the TRU be seen in a similar light once complete? But I digress. Ripon is a diversion of effort and attention from more boring and mundane projects with greater benefits for the future railway network.

The OP is "why doesn't Ripon have a train line towards Harrogate or York

That's a perfectly acceptable question to ask and the answer comes down to terrible policy decisions in the 1960's.

It's worth everyone learning from those decisions so as not to make the same mistakes again.

 

[tbtc]

The OP is "why doesn't Ripon have a train line towards Harrogate or York

That's a perfectly acceptable question to ask and the answer comes down to terrible policy decisions in the 1960's.

It's worth everyone learning from those decisions so as not to make the same mistakes again.

It is a perfectly acceptable question to ask, and the answer is that it's a long way to serve a small place, especially given that any station would be on the fringes of Ripon due to quarrels with landowners decades before even The Good Doctor was born

You don't even have the "regeneration" angle beloved of those trying to justify lost causes (though maybe we'll see someone conflate the lower costs of a simple long single track siding from Harrogate with the larger benefits of a double track line all the way to Thirsk to tick the "diversionary resilience" box?)

But telling that you'd rather try to create another "Beeching was a baddie" argument than deal with the realities of Ripon's flimsy case

The closure programme in the 1960's was, and continues to be a national bane

Not really, outside of bubbles like this

I think it's the kind of 'unfortunate but inevitable' thing that most people would pigeon hole with things like the similar decline in grand old buildings (churches, cinemas, banks) that we struggle to find a modern use for, see also what happened to our canals

Lines built to take the freight of the 1800s lacked purpose by the time lorries captured that market. Shame but the same all over Europe

Up until the late 1960's there was no attempt to make economies

A read of Beeching's own re-shaping report shows that routes such as York - Beverley could have been made to cover their costs through rationalisation.

That this wasn't considered was entirely a political choice by Beeching/Marples/Fraser etc.

There were many initiatives to rationalise secondary routes later on in the 1960's/70's - East Suffolk, Marshlink etc.

That these weren't tried earlier was a political choice

This is hilarious

"Why didn't people simply accept compromise" asks someone who seems to have a slightly hard-line attitude to preserving every single inch of track, and will not accept any network rationalisation (e.g. Barton on Humber, decades after the Humber Bridge was built and the ferries stopped)

If you can't accept a single cut to today's operations then fair enough but maybe don't criticise those in the past for their inflexibility?

Ideally we'd have seen some rationalisation back then, but with Unions running much of the show, it appeared hard to find any middle ground short of complete closure - they'd have insisted that all jobs were somehow protected on any "rationalised" lines, meaning any savings would have been minimal. Beeching had to live in the real world.

 

[Kingston Dan]

i.e. what the vast majority of residents want.

As a resident of the said county that is just not true. We buy cars because there is no public transport alternative.

== Doublepost prevention - post automatically merged: Saturday at 21:32 ==

It was sad to see the demise of branch line railways, something that was increasingly inevitable as the 20th Century progressed.

In 1900 most freight moved by rail, except round the coasts. Like hundreds of stations Ripon's heydays will have been before WW1 but largely unappreciated until after WW2. People like Beeching, Marples and Serpel are blamed for the losses but they were increasingly inevitable as we craved the independence and flexibility of our own cars. Alongside that army surplus trucks after WW1 and WW2, with many former services drivers to drive them took wagon load freight, far more flexible than shunting railway trucks around the country.

It's a miracle so much railway has survived. Very substantial parts of it are basically still as built in Victorian times and need large amounts of capital expenditure just to keep them running at all. Diverting multi millions, collectively billions, into reopening lines to places like Ripon make minimal business sense.

We can't electrify what tracks we still have to places like Swansea, Bristol, Sheffield, Nottingham and Hull. Old embankments, cuttings and tunnels need constant attention - and all that vegetation growing where it shouldn't!

The Beeching/Serpell era didn't just close branch lines. It lead to removal of surplus track mileage to reduce maintenance costs. No doubt most were good ideas at the time. I suspect many older readers will recall bits that were removed near them that would be useful to have replaced today - and more use to the modern network than little branch lines.

My favourite restoration would be to restore 4 tracks fom Dore into Sheffield. The original 2 were quadrupled in 1904 but by the 1970s they'd been reduced back to 2, those tracks slewed and bridge spans removed. Those 2 are now a bottleneck causing hold ups to services from Edinburgh to Penzance, Liverpool to Norwich and knock-on impacts across the nation. Will it happen? No. Even a bi-directional 3rd track with some effective 4 track sections for loops may not happen - or reconfiguring Sheffield station to increase capacity.

There isn't the money to provide enough rolling stock for the services we have now on the their current congested paths to justify building a a new line to Ripon. Certainly not with frequent services to compete with buses that get nearer to where more people want to go, albeit more slowly.

There is always money, but it is about political choices to subsidise road transport (and its externalities) and insist public transport covers its costs.

 

[NCT]

As a resident of the said county that is just not true. We buy cars because there is no public transport alternative.

Paying extra taxes to fund said public transport? Given the voting history of the area over the last 100 years, I'm sceptical to say the least.

 

[Ashley Hill]

You don't even have the "regeneration" angle beloved of those trying to justify lost causes

A lot of people (including many forum members) suggested Okehampton would be a lost cause, yet it is a major success. Admittedly going through Ripon is a total rebuild.

 

[deltic08]

Forum members have missed my point or have not read my contributions. The Ripon line was making £13000 per year in 1963 when Beeching and his raiders hit town, or should I say City. Beeching made it look as if it was losing money by deviously cooking the books to his advantage.

In the morning peak it takes 90 minutes to travel the 11 miles from Ripon to Harrogate and your place of employment. Strangely the queue is just as long in the evening peak from Ripon. It will only get worse as 2500 houses have been approved planning permission. There is little or none employment in Ripon for theses extra residents with the only places being Harrogate and Leeds. With a reinstated railway Ripon-Harrogate would be 10 minutes and Leeds would be 42. You can only beat that by helicopter..

The new station site would only be only 8 minutes walk from Ripon Market Place and within 20 minutes walk for 40% of the population. There is plenty of room for a 300 space car park. Knaresborough-Harrogate-Leeds station car parks are inadequate after the morning peak as they are full.

The very inadequate speed restricted A61 to Harrogate and Leeds already carries 65% of out of Ripon commuters daily. In a survey of drivers on the A61 in 2004, 50% said they could use rail if there was one. That amounts to 800,000 footfalls per annum making 1.2 million all passengers. There were 29 fatalities on this road between Ripon and Harrogate between 2003 and 2020, nearly 2 per year.

The BCR for the reinstatement to Ripon was 1.2 to 1.4 in 2005 depending on whether it is to be single or double track. Arup have told me recently that the calculations now would be over 4.0 due to increase in housing and can be more if projected housing as was done in East-West rail to increase BCR from original 4.0 to over 11.0 by adding in 100,000 possible housing.

Harrogate is the largest settlement (approaching 100,000)i n North Yorkshire apart from York that is now its own authority. It was only 35 minutes to the County town of Northallerton in 1967 via Ripon but is now over an hour via York and a change there. County Cllrs from Harrogate and Ripon area don't dream of using public transport to attend meetings

 

[Bahnopa]

Such regeneration or restoration of existing infrastructure is a completely different situation to what would be necessary between Harrogate and Northallerton where the line's former formation has effectively disappeared.

 

[deltic08]

Such regeneration or restoration of existing infrastructure is a completely different situation to what would be necessary between Harrogate and Northallerton where the line's former formation has effectively disappeared.

No. You are not reading my contributions. You may live in York but obviously have not visited the area. There is nothing to prevent a railway being reinstated between Ripon and Harrogate. The trackbed is totally clear for at least a single track and double track where a dynamic loop is required. All metal bridges were taken down in 1970 for scrap but all masonry bridges are still intact. According to Arup, they just need Buddlia removing and grouting.

I agree that the exit from Ripon to Northallerton is presently being built across by a housing development and small industrial units already built but that is against a promise from Harrogate Planning Officer that the trackbed is protected. We have this in writing dated in 1996. If we had the money we would take the County Council to court. Hambleton Planning Officer has also given us route protection. We could not stop the A1 motorway from bisecting the trackbed instead of bridging it.

 

[Bahnopa]

Actually I do know the area very well - I went to school in Harrogate and still visit the Ripon area regularly. Just considering the situation around Wormald Green alone, where the formation from South Stainley has been returned to agriculture and then the filled cutting after the tunnel under the A61 I would consider a reinstatement of the railway to be a very difficult task, not to mention the lost formation south of Ripon where the bypass has been constructed. I think the expression 'flogging a dead horse' might be apt for the attempts to get Ripon back on the railway map.

 

[speedy1]

According to Arup, they just need Buddlia removing and grouting.

Buddlea is a force to be reckoned with, like the Black Knight in Python's Holy Grail. It could be quite the insurmountable challenge.

Or more importantly, it could be the dominant contribution to the character of the area and its removal totally detrimental to house prices in a 50 mile radius the area's charm.