Spock the difference

THE Backtrack column has been running, and much enjoying, a series called Railroad to Wembley.

Yesterday’s column left things in Poole, on the Dorset coast, two better-late-than-never goals again putting Whitley Bay in sight of the FA Vase final. The story doesn’t end there.

The 21:00, the last train from Kings Cross to Darlington and Newcastle, is victim of the chaos that on Saturday afternoon engulfed the system after a signalling failure near Northallerton.

Asked what’s going to happen next, a railway worker (nee porter) at Kings Cross says that the ticket will still be valid on Sunday morning.

Told that a still-valid train ticket doesn’t go very far towards paying for a hotel room on Euston Road, she suggests consulting the “manager”

who’s just taken up residence on the information desk. The manager even has to be shown how to work the booming megaphone.

Finally they extend the 22:00 Leeds train, so that it continues to York and the North-East. Things are made yet worse because there are no reservations and no refreshments – a signalling fault, presumably – and because the Yorkshire folk at the table opposite insist upon comparing heart attacks.

“They took her into this room and shoved this thingy into her whatsit.

She said she’s never felt pain like it.”

A good thing after all that there’s no food.

The train’s further delayed because police are called to sort out “disruptive passengers” – a travelling euphemism, meaning prats – at Doncaster.

Add an hour for British Summer Time and it’s almost 3am by the time we reach Darlington. I’ve still to get home and to be in Middleton-in-Teesdale by ten.

There may be those who think you can get by on five hours sleep. Like those who believe we have a good railway system, they’re barmy.

LIKE the dog that didn’t bark in the night – that was the curious thing, as Sherlock Holmes explained in Silver Blaze – there were two strange silences on the ten o’clock north.

The first was that the guard never once apologised – such things are at best perfunctory and he may be forgiven – the second more serious.

He never once explained about compensation.

How many of the hundreds on that train, tired and (quite possibly) emotional, would know that they’re entitled to compensation as soon as the train is more than half an hour late?

How many would know that, if more than two hours late – as many were – they could be entitled to the cost of a return ticket?

It’s only in travel vouchers, perhaps little good to those who vow “never again”, but worthwhile, nonetheless.

Why weren’t we told and, though it may be little compensation right now, shouldn’t there be a statutory duty so to do? Another case, perhaps, of better late than never.

THEN there’s the Tyne and Wear Metro, which displays “satisfaction”

information based on a survey of 1,001 passengers. Marks are out of ten. “Information 7.6, station equipment 7.4, security 7.1, timekeeping 6.4, staff availability 4.9.”

Overall Metro satisfaction rating?

8.0. Aren’t statistics wonderful?

AMONG the pleasures of rail travel – there are many – is the chance, almost uninterrupted, to read the newspapers.

Saturday’s Guardian not only revealed that the NUJ was marching in the Stop the Cuts protest with the Federation of Entertainment Unions – so that’s what we’re for – but offered an interesting coincidence in the birthdays column.

Mr William Hague, former boy wonder and long-time MP for Richmond, was 50. Mr Leonard Nimoy, who played the no-less cranial Mr Spock in Star Trek, was 80.

Unless there’s a time dimension of which we earthlings are unaware, it may not be said that they were separated at birth, though there seems a certain resemblance, nonetheless.

It’s presumably a case of – oh well, they can have that one for the headline.

BACK on the railways, John Rusby in Bishop Auckland spotted this sign next to the East Coast main line near Meadowfield, Durham. “You wait all that time for a train to come along,” he says – and should have been there last Saturday – “and then have to close your eyes or turn away when it does pass by.”

IT was from train spotting hours idled in Ferryhill station waiting room that last week’s column recalled chucks, though not – it was a very long time ago – the rules.

Colin Harrison remembers something of the sort in his South Shields childhood, five or six small cubes and six pieces of plastic “which could best be described as resembling a snowflake”. In Shields, it was known as chucks and andies.

“A player would start with as many or as few pieces as he liked in the palm of his hand, a bit like a high jumper setting the bar or a pole vaulter deciding when to enter the competition.”

Wikipedia (with thanks to John Briggs in Darlington) reveals that similar games were played in ancient Greece and Rome. These days it’s chiefly known as jacks – “except in the North-East of England where the game is played with five cubes, wooden rather than metal, and called chucks.”

There’s even a world jacks championship, won in 2007 by Boston Bruins baseball player Patrice Bergeron, who managed to pick up 37 before the ball bounced again.

In the final, Bergeron beat Michael Stipe, lead singer with the American alternative rock band R.E.M. Stipe’s a dab hand at jacks. Easy threesie, still no one’s caught up with the terminology or the rules.

ALF Hutchinson in Darlington chucks up a quick couple, starting with Civic Theatre posters for the “all-new original Blues Brothers tribute”. Correct me if I’m wrong, begins Alf, but really there’s no need.

The other thing affecting his reception is Radio 5 Live traffic reports of delays “due to an earlier accident”.

Presumably, he adds, this is to differentiate it from an accident that’s still waiting to happen.

…and finally back to Middleton-in- Teesdale, where on Sunday morning we still managed to arrive early despite turning in with the milk train.

Much goes on at the Methodist church, including a JAM session – JAM with bacon butties – which will be explained on Saturday. Suffice that the At Your Service column was in danger of spreading itself so thin that a unique solution had to be found.

It’s coincidental because Phil Atkinson, long in Canada, recalls childhood days in Witton Park when the religious divide was more marked than it is today.

Roman Catholics like them couldn’t even join the Scouts because of the prayers at the end of meetings.

When the Salvation Army band came around, adds Phil, they’d knock on the front door of non- Catholic homes but go round the back of the left-footers.

“The householders would still have a copper or two for the tambourine but couldn’t be seen to support a non-Catholic religion.”

His dad, born in 1921, would still join other kids at the Sally Ann meetings, however – because kids got a cup of cocoa and a slice of toast just for singing the hymns.

“Those brave enough to sing solo were rewarded with jam on it. Me fatha told us that’s where the expression came from.”

It probably didn’t, though Witton Park still has an area called Paradise – and if not from south-west Durham, then whence is the phrase’s etymological preserve?