Wensleydale Railway
heritage railway in the United Kingdom
The Wensleydale Railway is a heritage railway in Wensleydale and Lower Swaledale in North Yorkshire, England. It was built in stages by different railway companies and originally extended to Garsdale railway station on the Settle-Carlisle line. Since 2003, the remaining line has been run as a heritage railway. The line runs 22 miles (35 km) between Northallerton West station, about a fifteen-minute walk from Northallerton station on the East Coast Main Line, and Redmire.
Regular passenger services operate between Leeming Bar and Redmire, with a shuttle to Scruton, occasional freight services and excursions travel the full length of the line.
The line formerly ran from Northallerton to Garsdale on the Settle-Carlisle Railway but the track between Redmire and Garsdale has been lifted and several bridges have been demolished, although one of the stated aims of the Wensleydale Railway is to reinstate the line from Redmire to Garsdale. Additionally, a separate proposal exists to link Hawes to Garsdale with a view to providing commuter and tourist services rather than heritage services.
History
On 26 June 1846, an act of Parliament, the Great North of England and Bedale Branch Railway Act 1846 (9 & 10 Vict. c. xcvi), authorised the Newcastle & Darlington Junction Railway, and its successor the York, Newcastle and Berwick Railway, to build a line between Northallerton and Bedale.
“Wensleydale Railway” enters the record as heritage railway in the United Kingdom. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Wensleydale, Railway and heritage can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 27, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q7982966. Authority coordinates are 54.293, -1.748. 2 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 2003 and 1846.
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This entry incorporates text from “Wensleydale Railway” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.