A BRIDGE over the River Skerne is considered so historic that it is featured on the back of the £5 notes that pass through millions of hands every day.

Over that bridge, 175 years ago, ran the world's first public passenger steam-powered railway.

But if you were curious enough to go to look for the £5 view today, you would have to clamber over a 10ft steel fence and trespass on derelict privately-owned land to discover it.

The world's first proper railway effectively started in what is now a fast-food takeway on Northgate in Darlington.

But if you were a young Darlingtonian popping in for a pizza, or a tourist from America searching for rail heritage, you would struggle to find it. And when you did, you would be little the wiser - a grubby plaque which supposedly marks the spot where George Stephenson, the brains of the railways, first met Edward Pease, the father of the railways, is attached to the wrong building and gives the wrong date and the wrong information.

This September, the Stockton and Darlington Railway celebrates its 175th anniversary. Yet, today, if you tried to travel its 26-mile length, you would find your way barred by overgrown fields, steel fences and dangerous highways. And no one would be prepared to give you a guide to help you plot the course of the railway that changed the world.

The Stockton and Darlington Railway pioneered the use of steam-power. It proved this new-fangled technology was workable to transport vast quantities of goods that would have previously plodded their way on horseback. It used locomotives to pull passengers for the first time anywhere in the world. It heralded the Industrial Revolution and it started the great railway era that covered the globe in tracks.

This railway did play a major part in changing the world. It also changed the North-East. It changed its landscape - Middlesbrough was just a hamlet, Saltburn barely existed, Shildon had no claim to world fame - and it changed the way its people lived and worked.

Indeed, many people who live in the North-East today wouldn't be here - their ancestors were attracted here by the jobs in the railway and its associated industries.

Yet, save the odd plaque in Stockton and Yarm, and the trail up Brusselton, even locals are hard-pressed to say exactly where the line ran.

Yesterday's announcement of major money for the Timothy Hackworth Museum, Shildon, and the North Road Railway Centre, Darlington, are as welcome as they are belated. Tuesday's announcement of a celebratory carnival in Darlington is also to be supported. But, unless the line itself is preserved in some form, the North-East will lose touch with its most important history, and these museums will become just heritage centres, isolated and disconnected from the past which has given them life.

This is illustrated in a story from Barrie Lamb, chairman of the Darlington Railway Preservation Society. "When we steam our Peckett engine at the North Road museum, it always amazes me that the young ones are most interested in the coal," he says. "They have never seen it before. They live in gas centrally-heated homes. They can't believe you throw these black lumps in and burn them."

Without the line preserved, the museums will be like a preserved steam engine - but without the coal.

There are, though, many positive plans in the pipeline and The Northern Echo's campaign hopes to pull together all the disparate councils and companies to form a complete commemoration of the world-changing route.

This action is timely, because already vast swathes of easily-preservable history have been lost. Bar a building which is known as the "first railway booking office", Stockton has lost nearly all of its railway relics.

The A66 to the east of Darlington has already cut across the old trackbed, so what could have been a superb walkway or cyclepath out to Middleton St George has been ruined. Now the Cross Town Route is once again high on the agenda. It presents both a potential threat and a wonderful opportunity. The original plans drawn up a decade ago would have bulldozed the old trackbed; now the road will run 30ft from it. It will destroy its rural tranquillity but it does at least offer the opportunity for this section of history to be opened to the public.

That will cost money. But it won't cost much to put the correct information on Pease's house, to open a 30 yard path to the Skerne Bridge, to put up a plaque in West Auckland showing the foundations of the world's first iron railway bridge, to print a walk-and-ride guide to the length of the line.

The problem in the past has been that the various councils and companies have only paid lip-service to the heritage, with Darlington and Stockton more content to squabble over which was the "birthplace of the railways" rather than get together and promote the Stockton and Darlington Railway as the father of the world's railways.

In 1998, fantastic drawings of a replica Locomotion No 1 steaming along the Quayside at Stockton were produced to promote the redevelopment of the site where, in 1825, the S&DR terminated.

The redevelopment is continuing apace, but Locomotion No 1 is on the "back-burner" to be realised in the "long-term".

Similarly, in this anniversary year, the rest of the line lies overgrown and uncherished, its potential for exercise, education and commercial exploitation going to waste as the weeds grow ever higher.