Barry: Get our village train service back on track

Jul 1 2009 By Barry Gibson

AS I looked at it I thought, that’s quite a metaphor down there.

Lying in the platform shelter at Slaithwaite Station on Monday was a pile of dog excrement – the same pile of dog excrement which had been there when I last used the station two days earlier.

The intervening 48 hours had done nothing for the smell. Indeed, a shelter which can normally house 10 people was effectively down to two seats – those furthest from the canine offering.

Perhaps Northern Rail, who manage the station, have been round since Monday to clean up. And perhaps they haven’t.

But either way, that pile of canine mess is a metaphor for the state of Slaithwaite Station, which looks like it was last refurbished before I was born.

The run-down, graffiti-strewn station has become a magnet for anti-social behaviour in the village, with the glass of smashed car windscreens glittering on the road outside.

Some residents have moved in recent months to form a Friends of Slaithwaite Station group to try to make the place look less terrible. And not a moment too soon, for the station is not a good advertisement for the beautiful village which it’s supposed to serve.

And everything I say about Slaithwaite also applies to Marsden, another jewel in the Colne Valley saddled with a run-down train station.

But the decrepit state of the stations is not the only problem. There’s the train ‘service’ itself.

Once an hour, an ageing, wheezing train chugs up the line from Manchester Victoria to Huddersfield. These charming vehicles are as clean on the inside as they are on the outside – and I don’t mean that as a compliment.

And, if you travel during the morning commute, the conductor often doesn’t have time to sell you a ticket, meaning you have the added pleasure of queuing to buy one when you get off at Huddersfield.