WHEN I arrived at lunchtime on Wednesday, midway through the first conference of by the Friends of the Stockton and Darlington Railway on Wednesday, I found the 150 delegates both bemused and enthused.

Bemused because they had heard a talk by an eminent speaker, Andy Guy, who systematically demolished all the individual claims that the railway had to being the first in the world, before building it back up by showing that it was the first railway in the world to bring all the other world firsts together and make them work successfully.

It was the world’s first railway that was successful technically, financially and industrially, and so it launched the world’s railway age as all the world’s other railways drew from its template. This, said Mr Guy, was therefore “better than first”.

Enthused, the delegates talked over lunch about whether gaining World Heritage Status for the railway’s remains really was a possible way of celebrating its 200th anniversary in 2025.

I had the pleasure of chairing the afternoon session, and began with a story about a little campaign I started in the weeks before the 175th anniversary in 2000 when I wanted to get the Skerne bridge open to members of the public. The whole nation had viewed the bridge – the railway’s most substantial piece of infrastructure – for a decade on the back of the £5 note, but ordinary people were unable to see that view for real because it was locked away behind a high metal fence with a gasworks directly in front of it.

BBC2’s Newsnight got wind of the campaign, and sent a camera crew up to distant Darlington. They got permission from the site’s owner, the property arm of British Gas, to film me in front of the bridge. They even persuaded two workmen to put down their noisy hammers so they could record my words of wisdom.

And so, waving my arms over-enthusiastically amid the fence, the rosebay willowherb and the graffiti, I was transmitted. Then there was a debate in the BBC studio in London, involving Brian Sewell, the London Evening Standard’s famously controversial art critic.

He dismissed the bridge as culturally unimportant, and he dismissed me as a “strange man from the north”.

Next day I called the gasman, who said that it was too dangerous to take members of the public onto the site for even one day to see their heritage and celebrate the anniversary.

Ah, I said. It is so dangerous that when the workmen had stopped their banging and crashing for the filmcrew, they had clambered onto the large black gas pipe that crosses the river in front of the bridge and, legs akimbo, had unsnapped their packed lunches.

They ate their fill and then, legs still akimbo over the great gas pipe, had lit up a post-prandial cigarette. They smoked merrily away in an obvious demonstration of how explosively dangerous the site was.

That was a month or so before the 175th anniversary in 2000. Ten years before the 200th anniversary, I was telling my story to a conference overflowing with so much passion and enthusiasm that it was considering World Heritage Status – an incredibly high bar – for 2025.

So we have come a long way, and I commend the Friends.

And it is true that you can now wander around the Skerne bridge, but it is still ringed by a prison fence. It is still covered by overgrowth and graffiti, and it looks as if someone has tried to set fire to it. A couple of weeks ago, I was to be filmed on the site for a preview of the conference – but, because the bridge, the jewel in our crown, is unsignposted, the cameracrew couldn’t find it.

We’ve come a long way but we haven’t travelled very far.