John North: Siding into the foreground

OLD Clarey was the ogre who guarded the path to Fairy Glen, or so we believed when we were but bit bairns. Had he been armed with the sort of blunderbuss with which Farmer chased Foxy in The Topper, it would not in the least have been surprising.

It is entirely probable that Scary Clarey was a gentleman farmer who wouldn't have hurt a fly, much less a fox, but you know how it is when you're young (and worse still, young and daft).

This was Shildon, of course. Fairy Glen was somewhere across the old Stockton and Darlington Railway cattle bridge which traversed the most extensive sidings in Britain, and possibly the known universe.

Then it was part of the world's biggest adventure playground, now those long marginalised sidings are the site of Locomotion, the National Railway Museum at Shildon, opened last weekend and with 6,000 visitors in the first two days.

In Shildon in the late 50s and early 60s, train spotting wasn't just a normal activity, it was damn near part of the syllabus. Train travel was a transport, if not of delight, then certainly of preference, the Black Path to the station wick with duffel coat and Thermos flask, with carrier bag and club tripper.

The station itself had susurrating oil lamps, advertisements for Virol - which nervous people apparently needed - and an elderly porter through whose bandy legs the milk train could have been driven with little difficulty.

There were goods trains on the back line from which the guard would detach his van with consummate dexterity but no explanation, night mail at 6.15 and Sunday diversions which weekly became a main attraction.

There were tiddler tank engines like 68696 and 68242 shunting shambolically in and out of Shildon Wagon Works, known locally as the Shops but unable to compete with Mr Birt the fruiterer, or Mr Calvert who had the record shop, or Fishy Finn or Charlie Hancock or dear old Bertha who sold peppermints and penny chews and who rides a motor bike at 95, but only on her birthday.

There was a bank called Elephant's Trunk down which we sledged in season, a coal fired signal box into whose mysterious midst we were only once invited to defrost and Crows Wood, where much was imagined and still more hoped for.

Now, in late middle age, it is possible only to wonder where the apostrophe might properly have been inserted.

There were passenger engines like 67777, forever the Flying Sevens, which rattled off to Redcar and a million raggy arsed urchins who'd grow rumbustious at their approach.

What larks, what larks.

Now the site of by far the biggest railway sidings the world has ever seen is an arm of the national museum at York - and as the railways are back home, we've been back home, too.

It's not only very good, it's free, and since the whole thing's just getting up steam, it's going to get very much better.

Even the too infrequent train from Darlington seemed busier than it has for ages, dear old Shildon station expensively and agreeably refurbished to greet its visitors with a smile.

Nearby, an information board quotes a 1923 commentator that Shildon station "possesses every distinction which discomfort can produce, and is the dreariest in the United Kingdom" - hadn't he been to South Bank, for heaven's sake, or to Greatham or Warrenby Halt? - and alongside that a sort of electronic sculpture called Light Engine which changes colour when someone sends it a text message.

What would Timothy Hackworth have made of that?

The new museum is linked to Hackworth's cottage by an informative rail trail which passes the Black Boy stables and Shildon's historic coal drops, dead gorgeous.

The giant hangar is filling with locomotives and rolling stock, City of Truro still smelling like an engine driver's oil rag - as all proper locomotives should - after being steamed at the weekend.

In the shop are facsimiles of those LNER posters which urged folk to take a trip to Tynemouth, South Shields or Saltburn but never once to Shildon.

No-one ever seemed to want to go to Shildon. They will now.

There's the prototype Deltic, bright blue and breathless, the Percy Main snow plough, the electrics which worked the Tyne quay lines and instructions in three languages not to climb on any of them. There are sand wagons and banned wagons, hoppers and shoppers, chaldrons and pot blacks.

There's the florid green of the Southern and the chocolate and cream of the LMS, the smoked windows of the first class inspection saloon and the altogether humbler look-out from third class, with which cattle wagons should never be confused.

There are interactive games of all sorts, the big departure board from Bishop Auckland station when frequent trains ran to Etherley, Beechburn and Crook and, next to it, the burnished brass plaque that marks Shildon's place in world history.

"From this spot on September 27 1825..."

The tour is augmented by Jim Kerr, Eldon lad originally who was a Shildon Works apprentice, became a gaffer at a plastics company and is now officially an explainer, a job title which may need little interpretation.

"People have been really surprised by all there is to see and do," said Jim, and well they might have been.

It is still possible, however - indeed it may be part of a museum's function - to look at the great hangar with the cattle bridge behind and to see only an adventure playground, and to long for those days just once more.

* Locomotion (01388 777999) is open from 10am-5pm until November 3 and from 10am-4pm thereafter but closed on Mondays and Tuesdays in winter. It will officially be opened on October 22.

A HIGH even by his own extraordinary standards, our old friend John Robinson climbed Ben Nevis - barefoot - in four and three quarter hours on Saturday.

"I hadn't so much as a cut or a graze," he reports, "just a little bit of a mark where I stood on a stump."

John, a 57-year-old martial arts master, was walking with Peter Bell and Michael Coyle - the others properly shod - to raise money for multiple sclerosis research.

"There was a buzz going around the mountain, everyone asking one another if they'd seen the dozy devil in bare feet," he reports.

"The mountain rescue people we met said they'd seen people with some strange things on their feet, but never with nothing at all. The only problem was that my feet were frozen at the summit."

The ascent was inspired by Crook-based accountant Philip Steele, a long time MS sufferer, who has been co-ordinating fund raising.

Donations can still be made via www.justgiving.com/barefoot crusader

THE October newsletter of the presently troubled Diocese of Ripon carries a profile of the Rev Jeremy Trew - by day, it says, a quiet parish priest in the rural idyll which is Spofforth.

"By night," it adds, "Jeremy Trew is deanery youth work advisor for Harrogate, fighting a culture of drugs, sex and violence - and that, he says, is just the standing committee."

HARTLEPOOL by-election day, lest any forget, and following last week's piece on Sixties singer Ronnie Carroll - the Rainbow Alliance man - a discordant discussion broke out in the pub about the oldest person to have appeared on a top ten record.

Ronnie's recently recorded Something in the Air. On the original, insists John Briggs, the pianist was in his 80s, though he can find no proof of it.

He is, however, able to confirm that Hilda Woodward, pianist on Lieutenant Pigeon's 1972 number one Mouldy Old Dough was "in her late 50s".

According to Guinness, Debbie Harry was the oldest female to have a number one - Blondie, in 1999 - while Lou is Armstrong was two months short of his 67th birthday when What a Wonderful World peaked in 1968.

Little Jimmy Things was just nine years and eight months when Long Haired Lover From Liverpool hit the top in 1972 while Ian Doody was three when he featured on a number 29 hit in 1969. His father was Radio One news reader Pat Doody.

Remember it? Groovy, Baby.

l George Weiss, Ronnie Carroll's agent, asks us to point out that they hope to sell 555,000 copies of Something in the Air and not 550,000 as we supposed and that anyone who wants to hear it can find Something in the Air at www.deadsexy.tv/555

....and finally, our attention is drawn to the "Antiques and collectables" sale this day at Addisons in Barnard Castle, and particularly to lot number 11.

Amid the "miscellaneous royal souvenir magazines", "group of three novelty tea pots" and "box of cushions" is, so far inexplicably, a bull's scrotum.

Once the scrotum has come under the hammer, and once we have discovered if it is antique or merely collectable, we hope to have more of this next week.