There surely cannot be a better day out in the British Isles this summer than the brilliantly ambitious and perfectly executed production of The Railway Children on the Keighley & Worth Valley Railway.
Staged as part of Bradford Metropolitan District’s year as the UK City of Culture, the perennially popular children’s story — first published in 1905, and never out of print — returns to the railway with which it is most closely associated.
Although the geographical inspiration for Edith Nesbit’s 1905 novel, originally serialised in The London Magazine, is unclear, the Keighley & Worth Valley line — a five-mile stretch wending its way through the mills and dales of Yorkshire’s Brontë country — has become indelibly associated with this timeless tale. Closed to passengers in 1962, just before the wielding of the Beeching Axe, the railway was saved and reopened within six years by a determined band of supporters, whose original intention was to maintain a local passenger service. Their chairman, Bob Cryer — later the local Member of Parliament and founder of a redoubtable Labour dynasty — helped to broker its role as the setting for Lionel Jeffries’s 1970 film adaptation starring Jenny Agutter and Bernard Cribbins (along with Cryer himself, who was rewarded with a small cameo appearance as a train guard). The film’s immediate success propelled the railway’s new fame as a popular tourist attraction, which it has maintained ever since, welcoming some 120,000 visitors each year thanks to the heroic efforts of its small staff and 750 volunteers.
This magical experience will surely inspire a new generation of railway children
The railway’s current chairman, Matthew Stroh, is among those whose lives have been shaped by The Railway Children: it was his favourite film as a child, helping to draw him to Yorkshire from the Home Counties of his youth, as well as to the heritage railway he has helped to run since 2010. Its Business & Operations Manager Noel Hartley started volunteering with the railway aged 11, and hopes that this summer’s show will inspire others to do the same. “My hope is that the production attracts lots of new people who have never visited the railway before — that they come, they see it, they enjoy it and they want to come back,“ he says. “I also hope that people who may have not visited before look at us and see that volunteering is something really great to do. You can actually get involved and find yourself a hobby – something different to do that adds to people’s lives.”
This magical experience will surely inspire a new generation of railway children. Travel to and from the performance is by steam locomotive and the impressive fleet of rolling stock maintained by the Vintage Carriages Trust. Passengers young and old beam with delight from the moment they embark at Keighley station. The immersive performance takes place 25 minutes down the line, inside an engine shed at Oxenhope station, with railway tracks running through the centre of the stage. This allows the brilliant ensemble to be joined by a veteran of the silver screen: the Lancashire & Yorkshire locomotive 957, which starred as the “Green Dragon” in the 1970 film. Witnessing more than 100 tons of steam engine rolling into the middle of the stage is a truly unforgettable theatrical experience. But the infectious energy of the cast (and the slick ingenuity of the crew, who carry out scene changes in full view with the quiet precision of signalmen and station porters) mean that they are never entirely upstaged by this undeniable star of the show. They keep the audience — ranging from toddlers to pensioners — on the edge of their seats, whether this is the first time they have followed the adventure or the fifth.
Director Damian Cruden and writer Mike Kenny have reunited to bring to the City of Culture programme this version of the production they first devised for the National Railway Museum in York in 2008, which won rave reviews — and an Olivier Award for Best Entertainment. They have also reassembled many who have been involved in the show before: set and costume designer Joanna Scotcher, lighting designer Richard G Jones, Elaine Byrne as Mrs Perks, and Moray Treadwell as the enigmatic Old Gentleman.
The familiar Edwardian tale is faithfully told, with some gentle embellishments to fit its Yorkshire setting. The mysterious exile from Tsarist Russia, Mr Szczepansky, is given an expanded backstory as a Ukrainian author — a subtle but timely underlining of the book’s exhortation for generosity towards those who find themselves afflicted, picked up in the programme notes with a nod to Bradford’s status as a City of Sanctuary. The Anglo-Indian identity of the eponymous siblings — played brilliantly by Farah Ashraf, Raj Digva, and Jessica Kaur — is briefly explained by reference to their father’s work for the Civil Service in India, where he met and married their mother, a device which feels as appropriate and unremarkable for the tale’s early-twentieth century setting as it does for this part of West Yorkshire in the early twenty-first. This, too, accentuates the family’s own sense of displacement without ever feeling contrived.
As Shanaz Gulzar, the brilliant Creative Director of Bradford 2025, puts it: “The Railway Children is about welcoming people who have lost everything, about people moving to a new place and finding their place in a new community, and about helping people seeking sanctuary.” Edith Nesbit, a founding member of the Fabian Society whose own itinerant childhood took her to France, Spain and Germany, would surely have approved.
The Railway Children runs at Keighley & Worth Valley Railway until September 7. Book via www.bradford2025.co.uk
