It says much that the Craven Herald weekly newspaper, based in the Yorkshire market town of Skipton, devoted a whole page to a 2023 event taking place in Colne in Lancashire. There have been tensions between the two settlements throughout recorded history. Boundary changes have not helped and as long ago as 1731 the antiquarian Thomas Cox lamented of Craven: “The exact extent of it we nowhere find.” The newspaper has understandably embraced as wide an area as realistically possible, despite much of West Craven being transferred to Lancashire in 1974. A change still causing deep resentment after almost half a century, it has helped to focus continuing attention on the loss of the Skipton to Colne Railway closed four years earlier.
Hence the coverage given to the annual general meeting of SELRAP, the SkiptonEast Lancashire Rail Action Partnership, which since 2001 has been campaigning to reopen the line. It has over 500 members and 50 affiliated groups. Under the headline 'Missing link vital for the north', it was reported that a £298 million budget was now in place to construct a new railway. It would give East Lancashire much needed access to the Aire Valley line with its electrified services to Leeds and Bradford. It would also provide a corridor for freight traffic as instanced by moving cargo containers between the northern ports of Liverpool and Hull.
Aside from looking forward, such meetings inevitably hark back to the fact that a mere 11½ miles of railway forming such an important link should never have been closed, as the cost savings must have been minimal. This argument is difficult to refute. A counter-claim that the cost of reopening cannot be justified runs into political turbulence coming to a head on vastly more expensive schemes such as HS2. The purpose of this article is to stress that it could all have been very different, with a happier outcome for the 'missing link' had it not been for lack of centralised direction during the crucial period of railway expansion. As so often, the chaotic years of the 'Railway Mania' between 1844 and 1846 had a lasting consequence that has not been overcome.
Canal traffic
Issues go back much further to the age-old feuding due to inter-county rivalry. It was a factor delaying completion of the Leeds & Liverpool Canal, the first directly to link Yorkshire and Lancashire, with constant antagonism between two supporting committees. One was based in Liverpool and the other, meeting in Bradford, controlled the finances. Liverpudlians at one stage threatened to wreck the project before it even started. By 1777 traffic was being carried from Leeds to Skipton, beginning its transformation from a market centre into what the traveller John Byng described as “this nasty, filthily inhabited town”.
Another twenty years elapsed before the canal was extended past the small mill town of8,000. The same trend was evident in nearby towns served by the canal such as Nelson and Burnley.
