LIKE Wally or Herbert, for example, the name Nigel now has undertones, slightly giggly and wholly inexplicable. At least two Nigels work in this office, both perfectly good eggs. One of the Arsenal's legendary back four was a Nigel, Nigella Lawson's old man was a Nigel, even the column's DVT-taster is a Nigel, and all right in a medical sort of way.

Much the greatest, however, was Sir Nigel Gresley, locomotive superintendent of the LNER from 1923-41 and designer of streamlined steam engines known to transported train spotters as streaks.

There were 34, class A4, names like Sir Murrough Wilson, Dwight D Eisenhower and Lord Faringdon, The seventh honoured Gresley himself, and whilst more familiar members of the class might be treated contemptibly, 60007 was always just Nigel.

The dear old thing now works the North Yorkshire Moors Railway, its very approach alluring, the note from its klaxon a siren to the still-smitten.

We joined it at Grosmont, platform overflowing with holidaying bairns and misty- eyed old steam buffs, half term meets half-terminal. The village store sells aniseed balls and black bullets and liquorice torpedoes, the station shop has railway memorabilia, postcards advertising Camp Coffee and Bile Beans ("for radiant health and a fine figure") and glass mountains of Mrs Darlington's extra strawberry jam.

As railway jam probably should be, Mrs Darlington's is made in Crewe.

The platform also has two collecting boxes, one for the corridor coach fund and the other for the station cats, one of which was rescued from the Co-op car park in Whitby and is known, rather neatly, as Divvy.

None would bet against the cats, and not the corridor coaches, getting the cream.

Even without the archangel Nigel, the NYMR works wonderfully - all day ticket just £9.50, but a severely restricted winter service. There were even horses in fields, redolent of the days when smut was just something you got in your eye when leaning inadvisably out of the window and when a boiler was something that had 250lb pressure per square inch.

Now, of course, horses are more likely to be seen hurdling the towns of south Durham or (if the urban legend is to be credited) taking their ten o'clocks in the spare bedroom.

Pickering, the opposite extreme, is a pleasant market town, its parish church decorated with medieval wall paintings. Francis Hewitt, the Vicar, had not only just done the Great North Run but given up alcohol for a year by way of training. It seemed a bit extreme.

Unveiled by the Duchess of Kent, a plaque outside the Black Swan notes that when the Whitby and Pickering Railway opened on May 26 1836, 300 dignitaries adjourned there for a "collation", cheered by 7000 of the humbler sort as they processed from the station.

Canons fired, it added, and brass bands played (tiddly-om-pom-pom).

The pub is open plan, warmly welcoming and with two ends - one that allows smoking and bandits, the other, happily, with neither. Real ale includes Black Sheep.

The "landlord's pie" - cold turkey, ham and chicken - was no longer. "Not much demand after the summer," they said. Perhaps he'd taken the huff.

Instead we had piping hot mushroom soup of the kind they used to serve (possibly still do) in Chinese restaurants followed by steak and kidney pie and good cod, both around a fiver, and processed back to the station.

Prince Charles had been there a few weeks earlier - given a go on Nigel's footplate, reckoned by the driver (whose MBE is doubtless coming Red Star) to have been perfect for the job had the monarchy not got to him first.

Wartime posters asked if the journey was really necessary. Whatever the answer, the best was yet to come.

LIVERTON Mines Fisheries is a Nigel Gresley among chip shops, and praise comes no more lavishly wrapped than that. Liverton Mines, ironstone presumably, is near Loftus in east Cleveland. Our only previous venture thereabouts was to the Holywell View pub, where former Green Howards CSM Stan Hollis - the only D-Day VC - had been landlord. These days the only view, sacred or otherwise, appears to be of the Whitby Farmers' warehouse.

The Methodist chapel has become something called Wobbly Wot Notz (they make bouncy castles), there's a club called Whispers; not notably sotto voce, and not much else.

The Fisheries is embraced by Cleveland Street - a long, low miners' terrace with doorways so small that many would need both to duck and to inhale, in order to gain access. Steve and Julie Pearson opened there four years ago.

It had been extolled by television chef Rick Stein, not least for using beef dripping. "It smells as if Sunday roast is in the oven," he said.

Framed on the shop wall there's also a 1999 piece from The Times, written by someone called Chandos Elletson - probably an anagram of "fish and chips twice, one with scrappins" -.which claimed that the success of Liverton Mines fish and chips was down to the appliance of science.

The formula, whatever it is, works wonderfully - the best fish and chips in very long memory and with a fulsomely home made fish cake thrown in for another ten bob.

The Pearsons also offer delights like haggis, calamari, plaice goujons and - with half an hour's notice - skate.

It's for simply superb fish and chips that we strongly recommend tunnelling out to Liverton Mines, however. Open Tuesday to Saturday lunchtime and from 5pm-9pm, Monday to Friday.

THE buffet bar on Stalybridge railway station, about which we may just have enthused previously, grows more glorious yet. Four ales - Millennium City and Neue Schloss among them - have arrived from the Durham Brewery. Even the tourist information leaflets extol Durham's charms. Stalybridge is between Leeds and Manchester, about £20 day return from Darlington and direct trains from Teesside, too. But doesn't Neue Schloss mean Newcastle?

A NIGHT off before the rigours of their recent beer festival, Cleveland CAMRA have also had an outing to Grosmont - the Crossings Club, above the Co-op.

"A brilliant little set-up, 140 different real ales in 18 months," reports Eric Smallwood. The club were so pleased to see them that, in turn, cancelled ladies' bingo night. No greater love.

The beer festival in Mddlesbrough town hall went down awfully well, except for the Boro council which - with wonderful optimism - ran its own bar alongside, sold a lime and soda on the first day and thought better of the idea thereafter.

Like everything else these days it was sponsored, the national champion Moorhouse's Black Cat Mild from Burnley underwritten, uniquely, by the Southolme Cattery in Appleton Wiske near Northallerton.

Rhatas, from the Black Dog brewery in Whitby, was named Cleveland's favourite tipple but was pipped for the North-East title by Cauldron Snout from the High Force brewery in upper Teesdale, a winner for the third successive year.

Even the pies were award winners, Newbould's pork and onion having just been awarded a gold medal at a European food-fest in Utrecht. At last, a proper pie and a pint.

....and finally, the bairns wondered if we knew what you'd call a monster that ate his mother's sister.

An aunt eater.