Settle Carlisle:- End of the Line? Yorkshire TV 1985

An influential half-hour documentary, made in 1985 by Yorkshire Television, concerning the proposed closure of the Settle-Carlisle railway line .  In particular, civil engineer Christopher Wallace suggests that the Ribblehead viaduct can be repaired at a cost of about £500,000, while BR's Ron Cotton maintains that the viaduct would need replacing at a cost of £5 million to £6 million.

The programme consists of film of the line, some of the stations and includes a clip of campaigner Graham Nuttall with his border collie Ruswarp, pronounced 'Russup', boarding a train.  There are interviews with Ron Cotton, the British Rail project manager, campaigner Peter Horton, civil engineer Christopher Wallace, and John Watson the Tory MP for Skipton.   A short section is narrated by the author and playwright Alan Bennett.

The line had a stay of execution and was eventually reprieved in 1989, to the credit of Michael Portillo, the Minister of State for Transport in the Thatcher Government. The dog Ruswarp famously stayed with his owner's body for 11 winter weeks when Graham died by a remote Welsh mountain stream in 1990. In 2009, a lifesize bronze sculpture of Ruswarp was unveiled at Garsdale station.

The video clip has been adjusted  for dimensions, frame rate, pixel format and appearance.  The PC applications used were Avisynth (AvsPMod), ffmpeg (FFQueue), VirtualDub, Wavosaur and Audacity.

John Ryan Bembess