The Weekend Read: How do you recreate a "new" - old - station like Gilsland?

Dr. Beeching did for Gilsland Station 50 years ago, but the infrastructure remains and the Gilsland Railway Station Campaign was front page of the Hexham Courant last week, and rightly so. The full story is below but I am acutely aware that the local campaigners have gone to huge lengths to ensure the campaign has full support from both Rory Stewart MP and myself, the local councillors, Network Rail, The Tyne Valley Rail Users Group, the local community and businesses, and most importantly, the 2 County Councils. The strength of the case made is without question:
- it would revitalise a local community on a multitude of levels
- it would help Hadrians Wall and Pennine Way Tourism
- it would aid business investment in the cross border area
- and promote greater use of the trains, which is something we all want

The Campaign to Open Gilsland Station (COGS) was set up last year; I have held a series of meetings with many of the people involved not least Northern Rail, Rory Stewart MP and Network Rail; the COGS study, as helped by Councillor Alan Sharp, has revealed that the project could take five years, and cost up to £2.5million. This is no small sum, but it is genuinely doable. This is not a pipe dream project. It does tick the boxes, albeit we still have plenty to prove. If Gilsland station re-opens, it will be a remarkable victory for a community which lost the facility almost half a century ago.


But then we come to an understanding of what is called the GRIP Process. This may sound like some medieval judo hold and, to a degree, it is ... but I will try and explain it and outline the plan of action:
GRIP stands for the Governance for Railway Investment Projects: this is how such projects have been approached for a long time by Network Rail; it has 8 specific stages. Some might see these as bureacratic, but there is a degree of logic to the process, and as public money is going to be used in the process - then, in particular, in these tricky times- a need to ensure the money is well spent is required.


This from the Network Rail site:
"Governance for Railway Investment Projects (GRIP) describes how we manage and control projects that enhance or renew the national rail network.


GRIP divides a project into eight distinct stages.

1.Output definition
2.Feasibility
3.Option selection
4.Single option development
5.Detailed design
6.Construction test and commission
7.Scheme hand back
8.Project close out"

The Gilsland project is already well through the early stages, with the feasibility study yielding positive results, and the 2 Councils are looking at ways to take the project forward. The 5 year estimate is realistic - this is not going to happen overnight. But the planets are aligned and we have a formidable team of supporters. Money will always be the problem, but if we take this GRIP process stage by stage I genuinely believe this will happen.

Fuller details on the story here:
http://www.hexhamcourant.co.uk/news/gilsland-it-s-full-steam-ahead-for-2-5m-rail-dream-1.1131325

Rory Stewart Guest Post - Crossing Borders and tracing our history

Rory is one of the brightest of all our intake and wise on history. He is always worth reading or listening to and we enjoyed a great day hiking together recently at Epiacum. This is us shaking hands across the border between Cumbria and Northumberland. Enjoy his post. 

RORY Writes: "Cumbrians and Northumbrians must have felt isolated and marginalised fourteen hundred years ago. Agriculture had collapsed around them, the population had plummeted, there had not been a new road or stone building constructed in two centuries. Education, industry, and trade had collapsed. We were one of the most underdeveloped places in Europe or Asia.  But within just two generations our remote, sparsely-populated area was producing the greatest art, spirituality, and scholarship in Europe. Why? I wish I knew. But it was in part because our rural isolation was a strength not a weakness.We were transformed, first, by a new faith. Christianity arrived in heathen Northumbria and Cumbria in two ways: with charismatic Irish ascetics, travelling on foot; and with horse-born Bishops sent by the papacy. We were ideally placed to combine these rival traditions because we were always a frontier zone. When Hadrian’s wall was manned, we were half part of Rome, half outside it. We were never part of Roman urban civilisation – our landscape and culture was more like ‘barbarian’ 

Ireland. But we were surrounded by the great walls and forts of Rome, and had touched a wider European civilisation. We were transformed next by our curiosity. We sent scholars to Rome, and eagerly copied down all the knowledge with which they returned. When a Syrian arrived, scholars assailed him with so many eager questions, that a witness compared him to an old boar, fending off a pack of puppies. We learned from the best musicians, masons, glaziers, and scholars on the continent. We studied crisp carving, and orthodox images from foreign sculptors. Then we surpassed them. On the Bewcastle cross, for example, we worked a sun-dial across a petal, invented unprecedented flowers, and filled an entire frame with a mystical checker-board. But the dignity of the figures, and proportions of the composition, remained in the best classical tradition.

We were transformed ultimately by our capacity to use with confidence the energy of different traditions. We preserved some of the tone of our own pagan past. We emulated the purity and spirituality of Irish Christianity while abandoning its most outdated and discredited customs. We 

followed the latest models of Rome, but we lived ascetic lives, which world-weary Romans had thought no longer possible in the modern world.  Within forty years, as the Mediterranean declined, Northumbria and Cumbria were producing the greatest artists, scholars, missionaries, and statesmen in Northern Europe. Bede, the greatest historian of his age, and one of the finest late writers of Latin prose, came from a culture which had been, not long before his birth, almost illiterate.

St.Cuthbert – an Anglo-Saxon monk, born in what we now call Scotland, dying in what we now call England – was the ultimate symbol of our Middleland civilisation. He retained an almost pagan delight in animals – he was fed by sea-eagles, and communed with ravens. According to an eye-witness, he stood all night up to his neck in the sea to pray, and at dawn, otters came to lick the frozen saint back to life. On that island he suffered alone as a Celtic ascetic. But he had a great reverence for scholarship, acknowledged he was part of a broader European civilisation, and died as an orthodox bishop, encouraging his disciples to follow the customs of Rome. It was because of men like this, that the pope, looking for a missionary, turned to Northern England. This was why Charlemagne’s chief of staff was a Northumbrian.

Our Golden Age has never been easy to admire, or even remember. It left no Ziggurat of Ur, no Machu Picchu, or pyramid. Many of its most distinctive contributions lay in advances in religion and theology, which we struggle to understand. Even its most famous treasure – the illuminated pages of the Lindisfarne gospel – is not a public monument; it is a hand-written book in an alien language: the turn, of each page, hides the last, as it reveals the next. All that remains of the seventh century Hexham Abbey – once the greatest building of its kind north of the Alps – is a narrow crypt, made of grey-stone lifted from Hadrian’s Wall. Of the major Anglian monastery at Dacre, fit to be visited by Kings, no trace remains beneath the stone beasts in the churchyard. Yet, no other civilisation has come so quickly, from rural isolation, to dominate the imagination of a continent. None has made such unpromising conditions a more rapid catalyst for seriousness, and greatness. It was a golden age lived to its fullest in places, not just without cities, but without buildings: in the red sandstone cliff walls of the Eden, right down to Wetheral, or on the island in the lake at Derwentwater. At Lindisfarne it is easy to be transfixed by the ruined priory, with its purple columns, tapering, like sandstone pillars, scoured by desert winds. But that building was constructed centuries later. The real essence of the Northern renaissance lies further out to sea, in the faint shape of Inner Farne: a place defined by the iridescence of the water at first light, by seals, and by birds. St. Cuthbert’s final home."