THE words sound fine, but news that police in North Yorkshire are warning motorcyclists to cut their speeds or risk being fast tracked into court struck a hollow note with Spectator on Sunday.

Visiting Helmsley at teatime, he saw two police cars and a motorcycle bobby presumably keeping a quiet eye on the almost ritual gathering of bikers in the market place on a glorious afternoon. But where were they later when it really mattered?

On the way home between Chop Gate and Stokesley, Spectator had a first hand, terrifying taste of the speeding menace which has haunted the beautiful Bilsdale for so long as half a dozen dreaded riders appeared in his rear view mirror.

The psychological effects of their reckless overtaking, even on a relatively straight stretch of road, had to be experienced to be believed. Roaring engines, headlights on dazzling full beam in broad daylight, one machine displaying flashing blue lights of questionable legality on its front forks, another avoiding an oncoming car by no more than about a foot only a few yards in front of Spectator and two motorists behind him.

Spectator, his nerves just about shot, suggests that the officers sitting around in Helmsley would have been better employed lurking with speed cameras in one of the many side roads or other "tuck in" places used by the public on the infamous B1257 between there and Stokesley.

Police boast that their campaign has resulted in more than 100 extreme speeders being summarily whisked before magistrates for using North Yorkshire roads as racetracks. Sunday's experience suggests that there are at least six blatant offenders still unaccounted for.

Home from home

WRITING in the latest edition of the Wensleydale Railway Association magazine Relay, Barry Wetherell, of Northallerton, highlights a tenuous but appealing rail link between two places sharing the same name many miles apart.

It seems that the 40-year-old Class 37 diesel locomotive, painted in faded blue, which is occasionally seen spluttering up and down the line between Leeming Bar and Leyburn was built by the old English Electric company at its Vulcan Foundry in Newton-le-Willows.

It was not the Newton-le-Willows between Bedale and Leyburn, however, but the much larger town in Lancashire.

A timely reminder that the Newton-le-Willows railway station in North Yorkshire had to be renamed Jervaulx because there was so much confusion between the two places in days when communications were rather less precise than they are now