In the late 19th century 120 railway workers were employed around Kirkby Stephen. And this year will be a turning point in the plan to bring Kirkby Stephen East back to life, say the volunteers who now look after the line.

IT WAS exactly as Mr Kipling long since observed, that East was East and West was West and never the twain would meet. Kirkby Stephen West was on the LMS, part of the glorious Settle and Carlisle Railway; Kirkby Stephen East, bigger and grander and barely a mile away, was on the LNER

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.

The ringing and the singing Peter, Paul and Mary

PETER, Paul and Mary were marvellous, not just the love of my young life - she was, anyway - but the reason that so many long-haired blondes became irresistibly entangled in it.

It's splendid happenstance, therefore, that the flower festival which the blonde and I are opening at Heighington's 12th century parish church tonight marks the £40,000 restoration of the church's medieval bells, and that the bells are called Peter, Paul and Mary.

Coincidence of an altogether more wretched sort, CBS News had posted just eight minutes before our search on Google the information that Mary Travers - once described as looking "all folky and everything", now a more matriarchal 68 - is facing a bone marrow transplant after chemotherapy failed to combat her leukaemia.

"We have a match, almost," she writes on the group's website. "Nine points out of ten. I hate to say this but it's close enough for folk music."

The ringing Peter, Paul and Mary - not to be confused, of course, with the singing Peter, Paul and Mary - have been going like the clappers since the 14th century, three of only five medieval church bells in the North-East. The others are in Newcastle Cathedral.

In the 1880s they wore joined by another three bells, rather more predictably named Faith, Hope and Charity. (Charity's the heaviest, thus allowing the engraver to pinch the immortal verse from Corinthians: "And thus abideth Faith, Hope and Charity, these three, but the greatest of these is Charity.")

The 1880s bell appeal included a human draughts match between the vicar and the village schoolmaster, so successful - it raised £5 13s 7d - that it was repeated on Durham racecourse and somehow lost £7.

Fund raising this time included a teddy bears' parachute jump. "I think we wanted to do something every bit as stupid," observes the Rev Dr Philip Thomas, Vicar of the village between Bishop Auckland and Darlington for the past 21 years.

The bells have been quarter turned, allowing a different part to be struck, and will be rededicated at 5pm on Sunday by the Rev John Dobson, area dean of Darlington.

At one time, says the vicar, they were baptised with beer, on other occasions anointed with oil.

So what will the area dean do? "Probably just wave his hands about in mystic fashion," says Dr Thomas.

Bell captain Dr Peter Williamson and his wife Rachel have also won substantial grants towards the restoration.

"The interest which people have in bells is phenomenal," says Dr Thomas. "The bells are still bringing people to church, and that's what we're all about."

The singing Peter, Paul and Mary formed in 1961, had 60s hits like Puff the Magic Dragon, Leaving On a Jet Plane and Blowing in the Wind and still sang together until Mary's illness.

The 1966 Playboy "jazz" poll named them the world's top vocal group - The Beatles second, the Rolling Stones sixth. They won five Grammy awards.

Another website - the Swingin' Chicks website - records that Mary's favourite PPM song is Motherless Child.

Sometimes I feel like I'm almost gone

Sometimes I feel like I'm almost gone,

Way up in the heavenly land, true believer,

Way up in the heavenly land.

On the group's website she acknowledges the thousands of messages which have helped sustain her. "I feel grateful beyond words. I'm sure it's part of what gives me the strength to fight and the drive to sing again."

Yet again, blowing down all these years, the heart went out to Mary Travers.

* THE flower festival at St Michael's, Heighington, has its official preview and opening tonight - £10 including refreshments - embraces 72 exhibits and continues until Monday.

Arrangements are by Shildon and District Flower Club, villagers of Heighington and Redworth and members of Cynthia Scott's classes at the appropriately named Greenfield community centre in Newton Aycliffe.

The church will be open from 10am-8pm tomorrow and Saturday, 11am-5pm on Sunday and 10am-5pm on Monday, May 2. Admission is £1, refreshments available in the village hall.

* A reminder also that the wedding and flower festival at St Mary's in Gainford, between Darlington and Barnard Castle, takes place from 10.30 am-5pm this Saturday, 1-5pm on Sunday and 10.30am-5pm on Monday. Entrance, including refreshments, is £3.