BACK ON TRACK

Jenny Agutter requels her most beloved role in THE RAILWAY CHILDREN RETURN. Total Film catches the steam train to the set to discover how the filmmakers and Agutter are honouring the original while ensuring a new generation see themselves reflected on screen.

- JANE CROWTHER

Having boarded at Keighley and watched the bucolic Yorkshire countryside roll by, Total Film steps off the vintage Keighley & Worth Valley Railway train onto the picturesque platform of Oakworth Station in a billow of coal smoke. Just as Jenny Agutter did in 1970 as Edwardian teen Bobbie Waterbury, who - along with her two siblings and mother - had escaped London scandal (was Daddy a spy?) for charming adventures 'Up North'.

Based on E. Nesbit's cosy book, Lionel Jeffries' film made a star of then-17-year-old Agutter and began a lifelong connection for her with both the material and the location. Agutter, now 69, has become a de facto custodian of the tale, revisiting Oakworth for celebrations and appearing in a 2000 TV remake of the original, this time playing Mother. Now, on this gloriously sunny day in mid-June 2021, she's on location again, stepping back into Bobbie's sturdy shoes, and climbing the steep cobbled hill from the station to Haworth on the moor above. She's filming a scene in which a gaggle of evacuee children, tiny suitcases in hand, are picked by rural families to take into their homes during the heavy doodlebug bombardment of cities at the height of WW2.