Hest Bank Where the West Coast main line meets the sea

I cannot remember when I first heard about Hest Bank, it was possibly something passed on to me by fellow trainspotters, but suffice to say that, living in Bradford, there was a regular train service to Morecambe and I saw the morning ‘Residential’ pass my school in Keighley each morning. Several of my friends arrived from Settle and Skipton on that morning train, and I was told of businessmen travelling from Morecambe and shaving on the train while on their way to work in Bradford or Leeds. The ‘Residential’ was a busy service in those days when few people had cars.

Like so many other trains on the line through Keighley in the early 1950s, the ‘Residential’ was usually headed by a former LMS 4-4-0 Compound and it was inevitable that the school holidays soon found me taking a similar service the other way round, to Morecambe (Promenade) station and walking north along the coast