The modest headquarters of the Poulton & Wyre Railway Society occupy a patch of land that used to belong to ICI, the chemicals giant that abandoned the Lancashire town of Fleetwood in the 1990s. A bright blue 1950s shunter, straight from the pages of Thomas the Tank Engine, sits next to a 1920s railway carriage used for storage. Inside an adjacent portable building, the president of the PWRS, Eddie Fisher, and its chairman, Brian Crawford, are trying to come to terms with their new and unexpected role in the vanguard of the Conservatives’ plan to “level up” 2020s Britain.

“We’ve got to seize the moment,” says Fisher, 54, who works as a driver instructor on the national network. “If we don’t take this chance, we will bitterly regret it.”

For more than 12 years, Fisher and other volunteers have laboured to bring trains back to the disused Poulton-to-Fleetwood line, which last hosted passenger services in 1970. Using secateurs, shears, cutters and chainsaws, they have cleared almost five miles of overgrown track, cut down trees, laid sleepers and restored several stations.

Local MPs including Labour’s Cat Smith – a PWRS member – have strongly backed their calls to reopen the line. Its closure left an isolated coastal community of 27,000 people nursing wounded pride and reliant on buses that take up to two hours to get to Preston, just 16 miles away. At a regional and national level, however, there has been political indifference. Limited proposals for a small-scale heritage railway, deploying the restored shunter, also seemed to be going nowhere.

A 1935 London Midland & Scottish Railway poster, advertising Fleetwood in its heyday. Photograph: Science & Society Picture Library/Getty

Then, during the election campaign, Crawford got a phone call. His presence was requested at Thornton station, one of the stops on the line which the group had cleared and brought back to life. A few hours later he found himself pacing the track with Boris Johnson, pursued by a posse of journalists and Tory party campaign workers. “I thought it was going to be a handshake and a hello, but he said ‘let’s go for a walk – I want to talk to you.’ On the track, he said: ‘We’re going to help you. How much do you want for a feasibility study?’”

Last week, Crawford met transport minister Grant Shapps, who visited the Fleetwood line to announce £500m in funding to “undo the damage” of the Beeching cuts of the 1960s and reopen long-disused lines. Fleetwood, and the Ashington-to-Blyth route in north-east England, are the first priorities.

Labour and the RMT rail union have dismissed the sum as derisory given the enormous costs that will be involved. But Crawford, an independent councillor in Fleetwood, is a believer: “I talked to Shapps: it’s an initial pot of money. It will start off small and then grow. And we are top of the list with miles of track already restored and there to be used.”

The sense of optimism is unsurprising given that until now the historic port has lived through more than its fair share of decline. Built as a Victorian new town in the 19th century, Fleetwood was the first resort in Britain to have a railway line, opened in 1840. For well over 100 years, Lancashire mill workers flocked to its beach during “wakes weeks” in the summer.

But by 1970, the car, rather than the train, was seen as the future. Investment was channelled into road building and savings were sought on the increasingly unfashionable rail network.

According to Fisher, the old arguments used to shut the line no longer hold: “Fleetwood’s lost its fishing industry to the cod wars. ICI has left. Once, people who lived in Fleetwood worked in Fleetwood. Now they commute out. At rush hour there is gridlock on the one road out of the town. And we’ve had a huge rise in residential property built around the town. The economic case for reopening the line is very, very strong.”

We’ve got to seize the moment. If we don’t take this chance, then we will bitterly regret it. Eddie Fisher, PWRS president

There is also an emotional dimension, he suggests, to do with identity. “I remember years ago listening to the Steve Wright show on Radio 1. A caller came on and Wright hadn’t heard of the town he came from, so he asked if it was a big place. And the way he defined ‘big’ was ‘does it have a train station?’ If you live in a place, these things matter.”

As well as freeing commuters from traffic jams and long bus rides, there is also the hope that trains will boost tourism. In his book Notes From a Small Island, Bill Bryson describes the view across Morecambe Bay as “easily one of the most beautiful in the world”. Crawford, 78, remembers watching the sunsets as a boy. “On the right, you’ve got the Pennines and you can see to Yorkshire. On the left, you’ve got the Lakeland fells. On a clear day it’s magnificent. Towns these days need to reinvent themselves and Fleetwood’s beauty should be a selling point.”

The PWRS was conceived 20 years ago when Fisher grew tired of the level of neglect along the forgotten line, which was a magnet for fly-tipping. Not a natural Conservative, he is aware that his personal cause celebre has now become part of Johnson’s political messaging, as the government seeks headline initiatives in northern, Leave-voting areas. The Lancaster and Fleetwood seat will be a top Tory target at the next election – Smith’s majority having dropped to a little over 2,000 last December. Fisher’s response, after years of the issue being ignored at national level is: so be it.

“We’re an apolitical group,” he says. “We know reopening the line will be a vote-winner for the next election. But we need to think beyond politics and about what our community needs. It was looking bleak, but we have happened to find ourselves in the right place at the right time. I’m happy for Boris Johnson to come up here and be on the first train on the reopened line if he wants to be.”

The phone rings again for Crawford, who has been involved in meetings about the news all week. “It’s my wife,” he announces, before heading for his car. “She says: ‘Have you remembered where you live?’”