Early Railway Travel In The Lake District

The Shap route was opened in 1846, causing, amongst other things

, the rapid demise of cattle droving over Shap, and the sudden growth of Tebay as a railway settlement. It was immediately followed by the opening of the first line into the Lake District, from Kendal to the hamlet of Birthwaite (now Windermere) in 1847.

It had originally been planned to end this line just short of Ambleside, and perhaps later extend it over Dunmail Raise. But Wordsworth (and others) had objected violently even though he was hardly in a position to object to outsiders coming to see the area, having written so much about the Lakes, and thus having himself attracted more and more visitors. The scheme resurfaced in 1875 and 1886, this time opposed by Ruskin and Rawnsley whilst proposals for lines in Borrowdale and Ennerdale in the 1880s also came to nought.

There were numerous other lines which were proposed but which never came to fruition; for example, as early as 1845 there were two schemes to link the Furness Railway with the new main line, one direct from Milnthorpe and another from Windermere, each leading to Newby Bridge, and thence via Backbarrow and Greenodd to Ulverston.

The Windermere line was promoted largely by Kendal, first to give the town a link to the main line, and second to encourage the tourist trade. New industries such as shoe making were replacing the declining wool trade, and there was an expanding paper mill at Burneside which imported both coal and raw materials by rail. From 1849 Kendal had a fortnightly cattle market and the cattle were then taken south by train. At Windermere, the station was far from the lake, its line pointing towards Ambleside in the forlorn hope of being extended.

An hotel was built, and coaches took tourists and daytrippers down to the lake or on into Lakeland. In 1801 Dorothy Wordsworth would note in her diary when a chaise passed Dove Cottage, but with the road improvements and the railways feeding tourists into the area, over 40 carriages a day travelled over Dunmail Raise by 1855. Windermere became a fashionable place for Manchester merchants to have their second homes; some even commuted, whilst others retired there. Within thirty years it had become a thriving town, and had taken over from Keswick the role of chief tourist centre.

The next line to penetrate the fells was the Conison branch of the Furness Railway, opened in 1859, built principally to export copper from the mines above the town. Again, the station was far above the town, but as copper production declined, so the line began to encourage slate and timber traffic, and tourism; a group of Furness Railway directors operated a steamer on the lake as early as 1860.

by: Adrian Vultur

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