Part 7 - The Harrogate Line

North Yorkshire was created in 1974, and as well as including most of the North Riding (and some of the East Riding), it includes the top part of the West Riding, except for the Sedbergh Rural District, which ended up in Cumbria, and which we will be visiting later. It also includes the City of York, although York itself was never in any of the three Ridings, instead existing in isolation at their intersection. Unlike South and West Yorkshire, it doesn’t contain any Metropolitan Boroughs, and so for convenience I have divided the next few parts of our tour – which will complete the West Riding – along arbitrary lines.

And so now we explore from the railway stations of the Harrogate Line, a thirty-nine mile long railway line linking Leeds and York, which comprises parts of two railway lines originally built by the Leeds Northern Railway and the East and West Yorkshire Junction Railway. The line today is linear, and as the name suggests, it passes through the town of Harrogate. After leaving the Metropolitan Borough of Leeds, it includes nine railway stations before ending at York.

There are no canals on this leg of our tour, but amongst other things we shall visit a castle, see traces of Harrogate’s past as a spa town, and briefly encounter England’s oldest tourist attraction to charge a fee. And for convenience, we will complete the journey in York itself, an historic city famous for its city walls and minster. First however, the train leaves Leeds and follows the line through Burley Park, Headingley and Horsforth, all of which we have already visited, before we make our first stop at the village of Weeton…