"A PROOF that Mr Summers' picture is not over-drawn came before Darlington magistrates the other day," reported a local newspaper - possibly the Darlington and Stockton Times - in 1894.

"A young man was charged with having been drunk while in charge of a horse and trap on Sunday, October 1.

"It came out in evidence that the defendant, whose name was R Johnson, with three other young men, had gone for a Sunday drive round the neighbourhood of Dinsdale, calling at public houses on the way.

"When Darlington was reached in the evening, Johnson was drunk and reckless and ran down a child in the street without thinking the incident sufficient to cause him to pull up and see what mischief he had done.

"For this he was fined 5s and costs, and probably has not yet heard the last of the matter."

IN the promotional material for The Doings of Drink, there are lengthy passages from The Northern Echo praising Robert Summers' painting.

However, on the day the passages were supposed to have been printed in the Echo - March 24, 1894 - there is no mention at all of Summers' painting.

The days around March 24 are equally devoid of reference to Darlington's Hogarth.

However, on March 26, the Echo does publish extracts from an address Sir Joseph Whitwell Pease of Woodlands, Darlington, had recently given to the Royal Cornwall Polytechnic Society.

In the address, Sir Joseph reminisces about the beginnings of the Stockton and Darlington Railway, which last year celebrated its 175th anniversary.

He recalled a guard who was about 5ft 6in tall. Because of his height he struggled to jump from carriage to carriage on the early trains.

It was his bright idea to put a piece of board between the carriages so that they were connected.

Sir Joseph also recalled how there were no signals in the early days. An old freight train driver had told Sir Joseph of an extraordinary agreement that he had had with the driver of a passenger train on the S and DR. "When he came to the mainline first from a limestone quarry branch, he had to tie a bunch of ferns around the rails so that the passenger train driver would know that the mineral train was in possession of the road," laughed Sir Joseph. One wonders if there were many incidents of Ferns Passed At Danger.

Sir Joseph enthused about how the railways had improved since those early days. Recently, he had left Geneva at 8.10pm on a sleeper and had arrived in London the following afternoon with plenty of time to vote several times in the House of Commons before 7pm.

The railway was so safe, he boasted, that it killed fewer than one passenger in every 169 million that it carried. It was so fast that London to Edinburgh only took eight-and-a-half hours.

With a break of 20 minutes at York, that 393 mile journey was completed at an average speed of 48mph.

Sir Joseph was very proud of the huge technical advance that his family, and Darlington, had given the world. Would he feel the same way today