Keighley and Worth Valley Railway

I work as Station Master at Damens Station, which is reputedly the smallest station in Britain, two mile south of Keighley, on the Keighley and Worth Valley Railway.

The railway’s main function was to transport the workforce to the mill at Damens, and each mill had its own siding where they used to bring coal in for the steam engines and take their produce away. The mill owners up the Worth Valley had to bring coal in by horse and cart, which cost considerably more so they clubbed together to finance the railway, to bring cheap coal into the woollen mills up the valley, and their produce away.

My first 25 years of working was spent in textiles. Now I’m the Station Master here. Not only do I operate the level crossing, but me and my team also look after the fabric of the buildings. The main reason I’m here is the level crossing. Not many cars use it, most of the traffic across it has two legs or four. I signed up as a Junior member when I was at South Craven School, in 1974, and I started working as a volunteer, most weekends since 1979. It’s a quality outfit. We provide a service and have kept a green corridor up the valley. There are plenty of property developers who would love to cover it in houses.

I’m a volunteer at Haworth Sheds, part of the Keighley and Worth Valley Railway. A heritage railway line which has been running for 56 years now.

For me, it was about doing something different from my day job. I’ve always had a thing for steam engines, and learning about engineering has really fulfilled a lifelong dream.

It’s very easy with modern technology to forget about what was. The railway fits perfectly within the valley and it gives you a glimpse into an era that’s gone now. Unless you’ve got places like this it’s just going to be forgotten. For me it’s a bit humbling, to be fair. In days gone by there would have been hundreds of engines and people doing what me and George and Joe are doing now, hundreds of people working on these engines. What this place has seen in it’s time. That’s what I like about it, you feel a bit of a connection to the past.

I had no engineering background but you come down here and you can learn skills. Nobody does it any more, it’s what used to happen in the past and unless you speak to someone who has that knowledge it’s just going to be lost, it’s not going to be passed on. There’s a lot of very knowledgeable people around the shed here, and it’s great for people of all ages to be able to come together and do all that.

The wreath is for a member who has passed away, one of the original people who were looking after this. Now most of them have gone, and we’re taking over the mantle to carry it on as long as it can do.

I have an interest in any machine that moves really. I work in aviation. I started coming to the local area for walking, became aware of the railway and became that person on the bridge. I found out they were looking for volunteers and it’s something that’s completely different to the day job which is predominately spent at a desk. It’s nice to come early in the morning, get mucky and get hands on, and it’s a really impressive set-up here.

It’s perfect really, it’s beautiful, it’s Brontë country with Haworth at the centre of it and spreading out from there. It’s rolling hills and a beautiful valley with the railway. It’s a perfect setting for steam engines to be trundling about. It goes hand in hand, a beautiful valley with beautiful steam engines passing through. You can see why it attracts so many people to volunteer and to ride on the trains as well.

It was always a childhood dream to become a driver, and I’m half way there now. I’ve been firing over two years now, shovelling lots of coal, it’s something I happily give up my free time to do.

I’m a bench joiner and machinist, I work at a local firm making doors, windows and furniture items, anything related to wood. I operate the machinery there. It’s similar and some of the skills I can transfer here.

In fact this building where we are now, upstairs was the store room, where woollen products were stored before being taken down to Keighley. Before that it was all horse drawn and the railway enabled them to transport large amounts fairly quickly. But later rail transport was not necessary because road transport took off, but then a group of volunteers saved the railway and this is what we have today.

My past three generations have been in the Bradford District. I’ve always lived on the outskirts of Keighley. So going back to ‘30s both sides of my family have always been here. This is something I’ve always known, something my parents have always known. It’s nice to see it going through and children born today should hopefully see it. It was always there, and since I’ve got involved with it it will be part of the culture of my family.

There’s even a culture around how you measure things. When you’re machining someone will say “Can you just take an inch off it?”.

One of the biggest learning curves coming down here for me was learning Imperial. Everything’s done in Imperial, and being born in 2001 everything I’ve learned is Metric. Imperial is the old fashioned way of measurements: inches, feet etc. In my head I understand Metric, so I try to convert inches into millimetres and centimetres. Looking at Imperial I always convert out back to Metric, it’s what I understand. It’s like learning another language, you always covert the language you’ve learned back into your first language, it’s what you understand the most.