BANK Top is back-to-front. Most passengers don’t stroll up the broad boulevard of Victoria Road, drawn by the vision of the grand main entrance with its imperious clocktower, 80ft high but using the natural rise of the land to dominate the skyline.

Instead, they approach up Parkgate. They walk beneath the rusty railway bridges with the dead pigeons swinging in the underside netting while the living ones plot the launch of globulets of poo onto passers-by’s heads. Then they sidle up the slope into the tradesman’s entrance, and have to seek out the ticket office which is buried somewhere in the jumble of station buildings.

It is, therefore, welcome news that grand plans have been drawn up to spend £150m transforming this station into what it should be: a great gateway to a railway journey of adventure.

But can those plans overcome the fact that Bank Top is back-to-front?

It was designed in the mid-1880s when island stations were fashionable. Island stations have waiting rooms and ticket offices built in the middle of the tracks with the up and down lines flowing on either side.

The big question is how passengers cross the tracks to reach the island.

In the original plans for Bank Top, passengers were to be enticed up the broad boulevard by the imperious clocktower. Their horsedrawn carriages would take them through the grand entrance arch where railway porters would await them, opening doors and helping with luggage.

The luggage would then be whisked off through the subways while the passengers were to descend down a lift, walk under the tracks, ascend in another lift onto the island where their luggage would be awaiting them and the ticket office would be facing them.

But, at the last moment, having sunk the lift shafts, “an extraordinary piece of petty meanness intervened”, according to railway historian Bill Fawcett. Members of the Board of Directors of the North Eastern Railway suddenly cottoned on to the cost of employing full time lift operators and porters. It would, said chairman John Dent Dent, “quite double the (running) cost to the company”.

And anyway, said general manager Henry Tennant, passengers didn’t like the concept of island stations. They would prefer, he said, to drive up the slope that had been designed as the back-door goods entrance because it was better “to see your luggage taken to the train than use the subway or lift at the west entrance and lose sight of your luggage which might go astray".

The Peases argued that Darlington deserved its grand entrance, but the penny-pinching triumphed. No lifts were installed, no additional porters hired, and so from the day Bank Top opened – July 1, 1887 – most passengers have eschewed the use of the scruffy luggage subway and have preferred to approach up the parcels slope. Can £150m put back-to-front Bank Top the right way round?

AH-HA. Is Bank Top a railway station or a train station? After all, you go to a bus station to catch a bus and in Newcastle you go to the Metro station to catch the Metro, just as in London you go to the underground, or tube, station, to catch the underground. If we still had trams, you’d probably catch one at the tram station or tram stop. So shouldn’t you go to a train station to catch a train because you can’t catch a railway?