LAST week we revealed how Keighley’s railway station is to undergo a £4 million-plus transformation.

The scheme, expected to take almost a year to complete, will see an extensive refurbishment of the main building and other parts of the historic station – which is used by 1.7 million passengers a year.

Work will include a facelift for the forecourt entrance canopy and footbridge, improvements to the access ramps and resurfacing of both platforms.

Designs are now being drawn-up and work is scheduled to start in April next year. It should be complete by March, 2021.

Here, former town mayor Graham Mitchell – who lectures on local railway history, chairs the Friends of Airedale Line and is one of the organisation’s ‘station adopters’ for Keighley – reflects on the early days of rail in the town. He also provided the bygone photos.

On March 16, 1847, the first public passenger train arrived in Keighley on the new Leeds & Bradford Extension Railway – over a level crossing on Bradford Road, writes Graham.

The only illustration we have of early railway facilities at Keighley shows an extremely handsome mock-Elizabethan building which would have stood in the right-hand rear corner in the present Sainsbury’s car park, just west of the Bradford Road level crossing. However it is likely that the very first station was a much simpler affair. When Charlotte Bronte sent off the manuscript of Jane Eyre to her publisher Smith, Elder & Co on August 24, 1847, five months after the railway opened, she wrote: “I find I cannot pre-pay the carriage of the parcel as money for that purpose is not received at the small station-house where it is left.”

Charlotte’s letter suggests that the first station of 1847 was probably a temporary simple wooden structure and that the handsome mock-Elizabethan station was actually the second Keighley Station constructed at some expense after rail revenue had built up.

There is a separate reference to the original station at Bingley where two years after the line opened, “the clerks’ room was a wretched wooden hut about three yards square and where during wet weather the clerks transact their business with an umbrella over their heads”.

It is noteworthy that in March 1847 the Leeds Mercury newspaper said the railway was “an inconvenient two fields away from town centre” which was still clustered around its original Saxon site on Church Green high and dry above North Beck.

The arrival of the Leeds & Bradford Extension Railway brought plentiful coal and roofing slate. Coal by rail meant more mills. Slate by rail meant more new houses. Mills and the construction boom demanded labour and created jobs. Job opportunities meant inward migration and the town of 1801 grew by 200 per cent to 18,000 in 1851, and the population doubled again in 30 years to 36,000 in 1881.

The coming of the railway in 1847 created an enormous growth in textile manufacturing and engineering in Keighley and within 40 years the railway companies had greatly to enlarge their own facilities to cater for what they had themselves created.

In the 1880s, the Midland Railway Company demolished the attractive mock-Elizabethan L&BER station and redeveloped the entire site as a new large goods depot and warehouse with horse stables on Lawkholme Lane.

It also responded to a great deal of local protest over horse traffic congestion (yes, traffic congestion in the 1880s), scrapped the Bradford Road level crossing and replaced it with a new ‘up & over’ Station Bridge with a brand new high-level station building – the present third station – on the east side of Bradford Road.

Today, Sainsbury’s supermarket sits on the original station site and none of that great Midland Railway goods yard remains, except for the stables (now Cavendish Court) and two sets of cast-iron entry gates onto Cavendish Street which were donated by Sainsbury’s to the Keighley & Worth Valley Railway Preservation Society – which relocated one set to Ingrow Station yard and the other to Haworth Locomotive Depot yard.