Action stations

IT’S War on the Line weekend on the Weardale Railway: French v Germans, Frosterley, 12 o’clock kick-off. A piece of the re-enaction.

There’s a chap in a beret, who must be the French, but no sign of the Germans. “It’s usually the Americans who are late,” muses Duncan Davis, urbane landlord of the Black Bull.

With the low cunning indomitably identified by L Cpl Jones, a couple of Germans finally pull up in a Renault.

“That doesn’t look much like a troop carrier,” someone says. Theme music plays from another car. It sounds like Maurice Chevalier singing Oh I Do Like to be Beside the Seaside.

Another German division – okay, a sub-division – emerges from the nursery school near the station, above which a swastika is flying.

They’re lined up, a corpulent officer and three men. Another example of low cunning, one speaks with a Scottish accent. “We’re doomed,” he says.

“Doomed.”

It’s been that sort of weekend, the day previously at an Edwardian gathering in North Lodge Park, Darlington.

When they come to replay the early part of the 21st Century, will everyone be in trackie bottoms?

Back in Frosterley, the French resistance appears to be a rope, possibly the Siegfried Line, across the platform. Duncan’s awaiting developments.

“Those blokes ferreting over there are going to get a hell of a shock when the Nazis start firing,”

he says.

Mr Davis, in truth, hadn’t planned on being a war correspondent at all.

He’s a narrowboat man, his craft conked out somewhere in Suffolk.

“I’m writing a book, it’ll be called Twenty Days in Whittlesea,” he says.

Battle commences when the train arrives, headed by a steam engine with black smoke and an avuncular manner. It’s to be a brief encounter.

The corpulent one, for all the world like a character out of Carry On Kommandant, appears to be leading from the rear. By way of further authenticity, a chap in a US Army uniform watches from the sidelines.

The skirmish over, the dead raised, the Nazis retrace their steps to pick up spent cartridges and thus to keep Britain tidy. Over the wires a message appears to be arriving, possibly from John Betjeman. It says “Send three and fourpence, we’re going to a dance.”

THE weekend’s non-denominational religious service begins an hour later beneath a rather flighty gazebo on Stanhope showfield, the station across the footbridge atmospherically en fete.

There’s even a George Formby lookalike, strumming his ukulele and singing about a little blast on his whistle.

By 12.55pm, fewer than 20 people await the start of the service. “It was like this last year but then a load of Luftwaffe landed,” says Father Neil Ritchie. Fr Ritchie, interesting chap, is on the teaching staff at Ushaw College, west of Durham, but is a Weardale Railway volunteer on his day off – sometimes a crossing keeper, sometimes a trainee guard.

Someone had offered him a spare seat on a coach to see the Pope the same day. He told them, truthfully, that he had a previous engagement.

He’d caught the railway bug as a little lad in Wick, at the exposed end of Scotland, would turn up after tea to see off the evening train to Inverness.

“My father knew the station master so sometimes I’d be allowed into the signal box to pull the levers. It was a simpler age,” he recalls.

The bug proved incurable, though there was a time when he flew gliders on his day off, instead. Back in North-East England, stirred by a visit to the North Yorkshire Moors Railway – “You have to smell the smells and feel the heat” – he succumbed to it once again.

Thus he joins a great gantry of sacklessly smitten churchmen from the Reverend Wilbert Awdry to the late Dr Eric Treacy, Bishop of Wakefield.

At some time or another they’ve probably all quoted a couple of lines from the sixth chapter of Isaiah: “The Lord’s train filled the temple, and the house filled with smoke.”

Fr Ritchie admits several theories about clergymen and railways. “I read somewhere that it was because steam engines were like congregations, they can be delightful and cantankerous in turn,” he says.

There’s even a model railway – “a Scottish theme” – under construction in a spare bedroom at Ushaw.

What do his students make of that, then?

“I don’t think they know,” says Fr Ritchie.

“They will now,” I tell him.

LUFTWAFFE reinforcements having failed to arrive, the service begins with 17 present.

It’s to be a memorial, not least to mark the 70th anniversary of the Battle of Britain.

“You look like you’re all good Catholics, you’re about 12ft away,”

says Fr Ritchie, and moves closer.

There’s a waft of cooking: possibly a camp fire, more likely the Beach Club Diner 30 yards away. From the other side of the field, a music machine’s playing Chattanooga Choo- Choo.

The gathering is a bit Dads’ Army, the better for it. There’s a lady who’s a ringer for Frank’s mum, Mavis, she who has Sgt Wilson for breakfast. A chap with a sort of Kleen-eze case echoes the spivvish Private Walker, though it looks like he’s got six months for black marketeering.

The service is simple, the only hymn Abide With Me. There are prayers for the war dead, then and more recently, and particularly for those who worked on the railways.

“There were many who made the ultimate sacrifice without ever leaving these shores,” says Fr Ritchie.

A carefully considered homily even embraces St Therese, she of the roses, “amazed and enthralled” at being taken by train from her home in northern France on pilgrimage to Rome.

“Railways are in many ways about celebrating the past. That’s their appeal.

In this country, people love to look into the past.”

It’s over in 20 minutes or so, most heading enthusiastically back to Stanhope station. It may be, as theologians imagine, that the GWR was really God’s Wonderful Railway – but if someone supposed it to be God’s Weardale Railway, could really they be far wrong?