KWVR @ 40

Roger @ KWVR: "There's nothing better!"

"When steam was finished on British Railways in 1968 I was only 15-years-old. I thought my life had ended - at 15!" admits Roger. "But in actual fact, of course, it was just starting because of this opportunity to stay with steam engines. Through the whole of my life, I've never not been close to steam engines for more than a few days." Now, that's dedication! And, of course, that dedication can be found in spades (or should that be coal shovels?) from all the volunteers at the Keighley and Worth Valley Railway - after all they've been running steam trains between Oxenhope and Keighley every weekend without fail since 1968!

Doing the locomotion: KWVR's workshop

It's been people like Roger who have literally kept the KWVR on track since it re-opened as a private railway on Saturday 29th June, 1968. Since that summer's day four decades ago the sound of hissing steam and the squeal of metal on metal has been a constant soundtrack to the lives of people living along the line as tonnes of railway locomotive speed up and down five miles of track through the Worth Valley. For the 200 or so active KWVR members, keeping these locos in tip-top condition takes up a lot of the volunteers' spare time - but Roger France is happy to say that it's worth every minute: "It takes an awful lot of commitment. Effectively we couldn't operate if we were relying on paid staff, we can only survive as volunteers. All of us give up a lot of our spare time to either work on the engines or operate the railway, or both in most cases. That commitment's pretty huge, but it's like anything else in life: the more you put in to it, the more you get back out of it! It's like one huge family, really, as it's a social thing more than anything else."

"Glamorous": The City of Wells loco

It's been a long journey from 1968 when the Keighley and Worth Valley Railway was reborn after the line was originally closed in 1962. But, as Roger France explains, the KWVR had many friends who were determined to see it continue - first and foremost as a 'proper' passenger service along the Worth Valley: "People thought they were crazy at the time, but certainly two particular figures - Bob Cryer [later Labour MP for Keighley] and Ralph Povey - were determined that after one of the other local lines had closed that the same shouldn't happen here. It took several years before they could re-open it. That was largely because a) they had to buy the line which British Railways in those days was reluctant to do and b) they had to get the authority from Parliament to run a railway and prove we were competent. And, of course, to get sufficient rolling stock, locomotives and carriages to operate a service."

After 40 years, the Keighley and Worth Valley Railway no longer has anything to prove. That search for carriages and locos has obviously been successful as can be seen just by looking around the workshops at Haworth station. Here, there are just a few of the 30-plus steam workhorses which pull tens of thousands of people along the line every year. Roger looks proud as he takes us on a tour of a few of the engines currently in the workshop for a bit of TLC: "Perhaps the most famous engine on the line is this one, The City of Wells. It doesn't look much now, but it's coming to the end of its overhaul. This actually used to pull the 'Golden Arrow', so it used to work from London down to the south coast and on the boat trains. This is our most glamorous engine, put it that way."

On the footplate of a KWVR loco

For many visitors on the Keighley and Worth Valley Railway, the big question will be: "How can I become a train driver?" Much like in the days when steam was king, Roger explains that KWVR volunteers have to work their way up from the bottom rung of the ladder: "We start here as you would in the old days. You start as a cleaner learning how a locomotive works and how the railway operates. Then eventually you get the opportunity to pass out as a fireman. Once you're a fireman you can then start learning to drive. It's a continuous process. To become a fireman would take several years but to be a driver it's a minimum of ten years. You've got to prove yourself in the workshop first - you've got to show you're committed and you've got the necessary staying power as well. It doesn't suit everybody, this hard life..."

Overhaul: Work goes on @ KWVR

Not everybody wants to step onto the footplate, of course. Some visitors just want to take a happy trip back in time - either to their own childhood years, or to how things used to be when their parents or grandparents were younger. Roger says: "There are people who came as children who are now bringing their children or even, in some cases, their grandchildren. And then there's The Railway Children [famous 1970 film heavily featuring KWVR's Oakworth Station]. If you take the warmth and old-fashioned atmosphere in that film, we've carried that on and I think that does come out." A trip on the railway brings back many happy memories for some, says Roger: "The number of times people come up to the engine and say, 'My grandfather was a driver' or 'My father worked on the railways'. Most families, if you go back a generation or two, have some links with the railways because they employed so many people."

Even locos need a bit of TLC!

Of course, to be a KWVR volunteer isn't really about money - just time and commitment. The bottom line is that for many of those involved it's a dream come true and Roger France is no exception: "I come from a railway family. The whole of my mother's side of the family worked on the railways so it's an opportunity for me to keep on that family tradition...Driving and firing steam engines, working on steam engines, they were the sort of cream of the working class and there's a lot of lasting tradition and culture that comes out of that which I think we've helped to maintain. There's an educational side to that but really, for me, it's satisfying that I've been able to continue something that I remember from when I was growing up. But for people like us, it would have disappeared completely."