CHESTER-le-Street market place: 11pm, Sunday: It is as if the River Wear has upped and offed and is taking the dog for a bedtime walk down Front Street. The dog's misbehaving, an' all.

In a sleet-lashed bus shelter, a group of youths eats pizza as a jackal might devour a lamb - that is to say, with scant regard for table manners - whilst weighing the benefits of enlisting in Her Majesty's armed forces.

"You've got to be radged," says one - and must therefore forgive a possible misspelling - "to want to be a coalman."

Lest anyone forget where they are, the shelter has the name Chester-le-Street ground into the glass. Another notice says "Wet paint", which manifestly is the case.

The pubs have had an early night, even the one offering "Frozen cocktails" - Dracula's blood perhaps, or Taboo with blackcurrant syrup. Lads with their shirt tails hanging out and semi-clad lasses in hyperbolic heels wobble homewards, bedraggle-taggle gipsies-o.

The 216 bus heads on a grateful last lap to Lumley, an ambulance splashes off sonorously to attend to the midnight oiled.

Up at the two-track railway station there's a little shelter, too, its floor awash with rain and with the detritus of fast food repented at leisure.

A seat is tremulously occupied by a couple who might most decorously be said to be there for Another Purpose, and to be awfully fond of a treat. As sure as apples, the Other Purpose isn't waiting for a train.

Others, at least, are waiting to buy a ticket. In what in Chester-le-Street may pass for chivalry, a chap in a car sends his female partner out to see what's going on, but calls her back within moments. "Best take my umbrella," he says.

A youngster reminds her parents of Kenneth Grahame's aphorism about a little wet and a water rat. There's not a water rat to be seen, just an awful lot of wet.

CHESTER-le-Street railway station, midnight. Alex Nelson, sometimes described as the station master but in truth an entrepreneurial and computer cognisant travel agent, arrives to open the ticket office, or workie ticket office as the night's events will prove.

The station, between Durham and Newcastle, had been unstaffed for 12 years before he took it over in 1999. Now he is the first in the country to offer Virgin Trains' half-price discounts in the wake of a winter of the most wretched discontent, Sir Richard's Branson's opening bid in the bid to get Britain back on the rails.

If Chester-le-Street hadn't quite gone half-crazy, maybe ten herded thankfully into the waiting room. There were coffee and Lucozade machines, lots of leaflets, something called the Sir Frank Pick Memorial Lavatory. Our researcher has tried in vain to discover more of Sir Frank Pick, despite having something to go on.

The first customer wants to travel from Swansea to Newcastle, later in the month. What with the constantly clangorous telephone and the cumbersome nature of the ticket and reservation process, the transaction takes 25 minutes. More haste less speed, as probably they say on Virgin Cross Country.

Telephone callers, as far away as Birmingham, are told that they'll be rung back. If you're asleep don't answer it, Mr Nelson advises one of them.

Another wants to travel from Newcastle to London, is told that it's a GNER route but that Virgin does have a service through Birmingham. It'll cost £17.50 and take seven hours. "I don't recommend it," says the station master. The night shifts slowly, malcontents heading homewards muttering "unbelievable" and similar early morning imprecations.

Shortly before 1am, a couple who've found details on the German railways website ask about returns from Newcastle to Gloucester. They're just £12.50, booked in advance, but take another 20 minutes to sort out.

By 1.15am, six transactions have been completed. The column asks for a return to Chesterfield on Tuesday and is told it's not far enough in advance.

Virgin on the... sullied old jokes may be inserted according to distaste.

MONDAY 2pm. Alex Nelson has had a few hours shuteye, reckons to have taken £600 during his seven and a half hour sojourn. "It's not something I'd want to do every night," he says.

He receives nine per cent commission on ticket sales, offered between any two stations in Britain. In four weeks he's made just £260, the usual profit in two or three days.

"It's been appalling. The entire industry has been through a mental breakdown of some sort. It's unlikely that British Rail would have reacted in the same way. We are such a litigious country these days that everyone wants to blame someone when something goes wrong."

He expects many more special offers, hopes that Chester-le-Track (as officially the company is known) will be in the forefront, accepts that tickets like Virgin Value are time-consuming. "The downside from our point of view is that the cheapest tickets are the most hassle to issue."

The railways, says Mr Nine Per Cent, will slowly return to normal. "After Hatfield, however, you're not talking months. It'll be years."

JOHN Briggs, with whom we had a beer in Darlington, was a clerk at Chester-le-Street station in the 1960s when there were rather more staff and many fewer trains.

He remembers the Christmas Eve when staff at Dressers factory, inappropriately-named, divested the station van driver and sent him back in his birthday suit; the weekend when a consignment of maggots got out ("the vibration") and caused mayhem in the general waiting room.

The station master's house, now the Labour Club, had eight bedrooms. "They did away with him," John laments.

CHESTERFIELD was chanceful really, though it might have offered the chance to wonder how that distinctive piece of furniture came by its name. From one of the Earls of Chesterfield, certainly, but not even the Complete Oxford explains why we should take it lying down.

It was the fourth earl (1694-1773) who not only observed of sex that "the pleasure is momentary, the position ridiculous and the expense damnable" - possibly he envisaged Cinderella at Chester-le-Street station - but that learning, like a watch, should be worn in a private pocket. "Do not merely pull it out and strike it, to show that you have one," added the earl, as he might of the Dictionary of Quotations.

The other possible reason for a foray to Chesterfield would have been to catch up with the Rev Tony Bell - formerly a priest in Peterlee, Stockton, Byers Green and with the Teesside Industrial Mission - who remains an ardent campaigner for a better cut for the cloth and now lives in those parts.

Tony's the voice of the clergy section of the Manufacturing, Science and Finance Union, writes pithy letters to the Guardian but, sadly, has been unavailable. We shall hear from him some other time.

INSTEAD we went Virgin to York, the Vale still helplessly under water. An elderly rake of carriages, known sonorously as slamdoors, was hauled by a yet more venerable locomotive called Porterbrook.

As with Sir Frank Pick, we have no idea who Porterbrook might have been, but he probably hasn't a Memorial Lavatory named after him.

There were fewer than 50 fellow travellers. In the on-board magazine Hot Line, Virgin Trains chief executive Chris Green wrote "with some humility" and of splendid new trains in the summer; in the buffet car a coffee and a breakfast ciabatta - railway companies like the word ciabatta, it's probably Italian for Wonderloaf - was £4.70. To their great credit, Virgin have also introduced "quiet coaches" where telephones are forbidden, a boon to the downwardly immobile.

The southbound train was ten minutes late and further frustrated in York. The return, which had left Paignton at breakfast ciabatta time, was precisely an hour behind schedule.

Virgin Trains apologised, as they do, for the delay and for any inconvenience it might have caused. Hot Line advertises bikes, no half measures, as well.

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