Flying Scotsman to join Carlisle to Settle celebrations

The Carlisle to Settle line will fully reopen this week following the most challenging repair project on Britain's railways in at least 15 years.

And the iconic Flying Scotsman will be joining the celebrations.

The Settle-Carlisle route has been severed in Cumbria since February 2016 when half a million tonnes of earth gave way under the tracks after weeks of heavy rain.

Full services will resume on Friday following engineering work costing £23million.

The route provides a lifeline to thousands of small businesses and is also a magnet for rail enthusiasts.

Network Rail, which was set up in 2002 to maintain and enhance railwayinfrastructure, said the scale and remote location of the repair work made it the most challenging in its history.

The first Northern service will depart Carlisle at 5.50am on Friday, with world famous locomotive Flying Scotsman making a special trip to the city to mark the occasion.

The Flying Scotsman will leave Oxenhope at 8.30am and arrive in Carlisle at around 1pm before returning at 3.30pm meaning that it will be in the city for nearly three hours for fans to view.

The reopening of the whole line - which is normally used by more than a million passengers each year - will be a welcome boost to the region's tourism industry.

The 72-mile route takes passengers through the ruggedly beautiful countryside of the Yorkshire Dales and the Eden Valley, and includes the Ribblehead Viaduct, which is 104ft high and has 24 arches.

A section of the line was shut on February 9 last year at Eden Brows, nearArmathwaite village, south of Carlisle after aerial surveillance and trackmonitoring teams detected the ground slipping beneath the railway towards the River Eden 70 metres below.

Over the following weeks the track subsided one-and-a-half metres.

The repair project involved hundreds of steel tubes filled with concrete beingset into the hillside to form a corridor on which a 100-metre long concrete slab was placed, giving the railway a solid base.

Network Rail has pledged that "if the ground gives way again in future, therailway will not".

Built in 1876 as one of the last major Victorian infrastructure projects, traffic on the line has been light for the majority of its existence.

British Rail proposed its closure in 1983, but the Conservative government announced a reprieve in 1989 following a huge public outcry.