A MAN who helped save the Carlisle to Settle railway has been recognised for 60 years of membership in a professional body.

Dr Stanley Robinson, of Natland, near Kendal, said he felt ‘very proud’ to have received a certificate from the Chartered Institute of Logistics and Transport.

“I have been working in this field all my professional life,” he said.

“I have some happy memories of engineering projects and teaching my trade to the next generation.

“I worked on the Settle-Carlisle line to save it from closure.

“I did the work into backing up the case to save the line, as part of that team.

“It is now one of the most profitable railway services in Britain - and to think it could have closed in the 1980s.”

Dr Robinson, 86, said the line had been threatened as a result of the Beeching cuts - referring to the closure of thousands of miles of railway and thousands of stations following two reports written by Richard Beeching, chairman of British Railways.

Dr Robinson said the line was saved with the help of then Minister of State for Transport Michael Portillo, who ‘pleaded with Margaret Thatcher’, and ‘a few hundred supporters’.

Dr Robinson was a senior planner (transportation) at the county council’s planning department until 1988.

“In Cumbria, I surveyed all the rural transport of the county to assess what was needed and which services needed to be subsidised and maintained when they were threatened with closure,” he said.

He went on to teach his trade and became a member of The Royal Town Planning Institute and a life fellow at the Royal Society of Arts.

Dr Robinson also became a fellow at the Royal Geographical Society.