Bay watch

For Dave Foxton there’s North Bay nostalgia, too. Based in Shildon, Dave runs Rail Restorations North East with business partner Mike Wood, a Spennymoor GP. They’ve been working on a couple of North Bay locos – Neptune, there from the first whistle, and Triton, which arrived the following year and thus is numbered 1932.

“Principally a paint job, but you don’t get to 80 without needing a few things straightening out,” says Dave.

He was seven, 50 years ago next month, when his father succumbed to infant insistence and first ventured into Neptune’s irresistible orbit.

“I remember telling him that one day I wanted to work on Neptune. I never thought it would happen like this,” says Dave, who also helps run the Durham Railway Preservation Society.

The company has already restored North Bay carriages and is also working on a 1938 United bus, once at Durham depot.

The North Bay locomotives are said to be third-scale models of A3 steam engines like The Flying Scotsman, though diesel-hauled. The railway, seven-eighths of a mile around the edge of Peasholm Park, marks the anniversary with a weekend of celebrations from May 21 to 23.

THE other Shildon link in all this is retired teacher Joe Coates, born and raised in the town but now Scarborough-based author of children’s books about the North Bay Railway.

The first, as we noted two years ago, had the engine driver stopping to pick up a teddy bear dropped on the line. “It’s about the most dramatic thing that’s ever going to happen,”

said Joe, who’ll be giving readings over the anniversary weekend.

The railway also claims Yorkshire’s smallest pub – the Boatman’s Tavern, real ale from the Wold Top brewery, is due to open tomorrow – and plans Britain’s biggest cuckoo clock. “I think it’ll be the clock that’s big, not the cuckoo. They’re full of great ideas,” says Joe.

His latest book is An Alphabet of Stories written for primary school assembly or classroom. Full circle, all the books are on sale at Locomotion, the National Railway Museum in Shildon.

DAVID Coates, Joe’s brother, is now in print, too. His first book – “A mother breast feeding her baby and other poems” – is available initially from Lily Lloyd florists in Church Street, Shildon and via davidcoatespoetry@yahoo.co.uk ACOINCIDENTAL chance to strengthen old school ties, I was also back in Shildon a week gone Friday – chatting with year four at Timothy Hackworth primary on the joys and skills of journalism.

They’d been listening to a futuristic story about ingestion zones and gloop bowls. It seemed almost anachronistic to mention Rudyard Kipling.

I keep six honest serving men They taught me all I knew.

Their names are What and Why and When And How and Where and Who.

The kids were bright, polite and inquisitive.

At 11.30am, honest, all of them looked round when I pointed to the window and wondered what an eagle was doing outside.

There’ve been many memorable moments down the years at Tin Tacks in Shildon. Making April Fools of the whole of year four was undoubtedly best yet.

WE’D talked of the need to be everquestioning, of the extra-ordinariness of ordinary folk. On the No 1 back to Darlington, I fell into conversation with an elderly lady headed for the whist drive at the Dolphin Centre.

“Can you put something in the paper,” she said. “Whist drives are dying. We have to travel all over for a game now.”

It may not be the stuff of legend – not “Whist lads, ha’ad your gobs” as they almost said of the Lambton Worm – but right now there’s nothing else on the cards.

THE following day, April 2, the At Your Service column featured Middleton-in-Teesdale Methodist church where the traditional service had been led by the Reverend Richard Hunter, a retired minister.

Richard was a fifth-generation sheep farmer in the lonely hills above the Roman Wall before training, quite late, for the ministry. He came to Barnard Castle, still lives in Startforth. The same morning, another coincidence, his brother appeared in Another Paper.

Sir Philip Hunter, for many years a senior figure in English education, was back to open new facilities at Humshaugh primary school, in the Tyne Valley, which he and Richard had attended more than 60 years earlier.

Philip recalled that he’d become the first child in the country to be allowed a taxi to school because of the distance and remoteness of the journey.

Richard, however, was two years older and didn’t qualify. So it was that, whatever the weather, the younger brother’s taxi would speed past the future churchman as he struggled to school on his bike.

Nothing much changes, does it?