East side story

Trains from Darlington and Barnard Castle stopped there after surmounting Stainmore Summit, perhaps pushed to go much further. Services from Tebay and Penrith arrived from the opposite direction, the really hard work - and the extraordinary Belah viaduct - still stretching ahead of them.

Kirkby Stephen West lives, the station magnificently reborn and immaculately maintained. After 101 years, Kirkby Stephen East closed on January 20 1962, a melancholy occasion on which passengers wore black ties and a parting piper played Auld Lang Syne.

"Kirkby's transport future now depends on being a staging post for charabancs to Blackpool and the Lakes," The Northern Echo reported.

In extolling the West station's renaissance, however, the column suggested two weeks ago - literally in passing - that the site of the LNER station was now an industrial estate.

The job was only partly correct. There's an east side story, too.

While much of it remains industrialised, work is progressing to reinstate Kirkby Stephen East and all its wondrous works and within two years to relay a two mile track to Waitby. European funding is already in place, other major developments are thought imminent.

In the late 19th century, 120 railway workers were employed around Kirkby Stephen, the youngest ten and the oldest 75, a 13-year-old boy killed in 1875 on a construction site where he'd worked for two years as a "nipper".

Now the work's all done by volunteers, folk who know their station in life and call it KSE for short - as, hereafter, shall we. The Stainmore Railway Company is headed by chairman and secretary Mike Thompson and Sue Jones, who both live in Sedgefield.

"The year 2005 will probably be seen as a major turning point in our efforts to bring KSE back to life," says Mike Thompson. "It's sobering to realise how much we've achieved in a relatively short space of time," says Sue Jones.

They've both steam and diesel engines, several elderly carriages and freight wagons, a snow plough - always a snow plough over Stainmore - and already a museum room full of reminders of a distant railway age as a step towards a railway heritage centre.

"It should never have closed down in the first place," insists SRC press officer Mark Keefe. "British Rail went ahead despite massive protests and within 18 months had torn up all the line and torn down all the major structures. They simply couldn't do it fast enough. The bitterness remains and we've had tremendous support in the community."

Born seven years after the unhappy event, Keefe was 14 when he joined the successful campaign to save the Settle and Carlisle. "I knew what had happened to the Stainmore," he says. "We couldn't have it happening again."

Already the station is beginning to look its old self, and has welcomed back former LNER men. "They sit talking about firing J21s over Stainmore," says Keefe. "We just sit there drooling at the mouth.

"We may never cross Stainmore again, but we're determined to make something very special of KSE."

FURTHER to last week's piece on Haverton Hill, the almost disappeared industrial village on north Teesside, Martin Birtle recalls that, though they lived in Billingham as kids, the GPs - wick with the coughs and wheezes of unneighbourly ICI - remained at Haverton. "If you hadn't anything wrong with you when you went in," says Martin, "you certainly had when you left."

THE Pennine Way marked its 40th foot slogging anniversary last weekend, The Northern Echo's starting point report coupled with an apology.

We'd called the former Cat Hole Inn in Keld, top end of Swaledale, the Catholic Inn. "It was a crackly line from Horton-in-Ribblesdale," pleaded the reporter, and at the Cat Hole, only the tastes were catholic.

The pub had earned a bit of a bad name, not least because of a certain laxity towards licensing hours. Finally, in the 1950s, it was bought by local Methodist preacher Jim Alderson who immediately shut it, changed the name to Hope House and held revival meetings there.

Twenty years later, Mr Alderson was again in the news after complaining in a letter to the Darlington and Stockton Times that the Sunday night dales ladies' darts league was "a sea of unfaithfulness".

Among the outraged was Doreen Kirkbride, landlady of the Board in Hawes. "You haven't time to be unfaithful when you're playing darts," she said.

"Just about the most sexy thing that ever happens is twanging the chap next door's braces."

The score, of course, remains exactly the same today.

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