KEIGHLEY’S road, rail and canal heritage will be showcased in a major event during the Spring Bank weekend.

A two-day transport festival entitled In Motion will be held at seven locations around the town including the Leeds and Liverpool Canal.

A free bus service will take people between display sites at Cliffe Castle, Stockbridge Wharf, East Riddlesden Hall, Keighley College, the Airedale Shopping Centre, Keighley Civic Centre, and Rail Story at Ingrow West railway station.

More than 20 organisations are taking part in the event on Sunday and Monday, May 24 and 25.

One of the coordinators is Graham Mitchell, a long-time organiser of local transport heritage events and a former Keighley town mayor.

He said the concept for the Transport Festival originally came from from the Leeds & Liverpool Canal Society and the Canal & River Trust, as a way to showcase the road, rail and water-borne heritage transport of Keighley across the ages.

Mr Mitchell said the festival would offer free activities for everyone from dedicated enthusiasts to family groups.

He said: “The festival will provide historic interpretations and displays of transport by canal barges and narrow boats, pack horses and horse-drawn coaches and wagons, mounted police, trolleybuses and motor buses, motorbikes and vintage cars, model and full-size steam railways.

“There are locations stretching right across the town from Stockbridge Wharf to Rail Story Ingrow, and from Cliffe Castle to East Riddlesden Hall, including the Civic Centre and the Airedale Centre.

“Despite the fact that we are still four months from the festival, all the organisations are committed to the project.”

Mr Mitchell said an important feature would be a static display of historic buses and trolleybuses that operated in public passenger service in Keighley over 60 years from 1913 to 1973.

He added: “This display will include the newly-constructed replica 1913 Cedes-Stoll single deck trolleybus, Keighley Corporation No 0, launched by Cllr Peter Corkindale, the Keighley town mayor, and the cosmetically-restored original 1924 Straker Clough double deck trolleybus, Keighley Corporation No 5.

“Both of these have been featured in the Keighley News, together with motorbuses which operated in Keighley, or into Keighley, in the 1930s, 1950s and 1960s.

The Keighley Bus Company will operate a free bus service every 15 minutes, enabling visitors to move with ease from location to location.

Enthusiasts spent two years recreating the Cedes-Stoll trolley bus, which was unveiled last year at the volunteer-run Trolleybus Museum in Sandtoft, Doncaster.

The original vehicle operated in Keighley in post-Edwardian years, between 1913 and 1924.

Work on the replica trolleybus was carried out in the Czech Republic, by a team which had already constructed a replica of a 1907 vehicle that operated in Austria.

Behind the initiative was Dave Chick, project manager at the Trolleybus Museum.

He said: “The Czech team offered to build a replica for the museum and it was decided that the most interesting trolleybus of the type was the 1911 vehicle which spent most of its life in Keighley – where it was known as ‘the Austrian car’ because its chassis was built in Vienna."

At the unveiling of the replica vehicle, Keighley town mayor Cllr Peter Corkindale said the Cedes-Stoll system was viewed at the time as the best available and the then council had wanted something different to that installed in Bradford in 1911.

He also described how the council only had a single set of wires on each route, which meant that when two vehicles travelling in opposite directions met, the cables had to be unplugged and handed over.

Visit keighley-in-motion.co.uk for further information about all the planned events.