WE Shildon lads have a strange but abiding affection for the Prince of Wales tunnel: none other had a black hole, we supposed, at least not this side of Calcutta.

Its 175th anniversary, the day when trains first ran through from Darlington to Bishop Auckland and Crook, fell last Wednesday. The tunnel’s still in use: not to have marked the occasion would have been akin to forgetting the wife’s birthday, or at least an elderly grandparent’s.

Almost everyone did forget it, of course.

The ceremonial opening had been on January 10, 1842, cannons to the right and to the left of them and the band playing Merrily Danced the Quaker’s Wife (a terpsichorean extravaganza in which doubtless the lady was not alone.)

Gaffers and other gentlemen were banqueted at the Cross Keys, long gone, but once almost directly above the tunnel, the workers entertained at six other pubs in the town.

These days it’s doubtful if half a dozen Shildon pubs survive, and certainly not at dinner time.

Last week’s anniversary was to have been marked by a walk along what we called the Black Path, though these days it’s Memory Lane. Just four of us turned out.

OH, but it was a glorious feat of engineering, a 1,225yd long shaft 120ft beneath the young Victorian town. It cost £120,000, piled seven million bricks, was 23ft high, 21ft wide, could accommodate lines in both directions and with the help of Irish navvies was completed in under three years.

Durham Cathedral was older and (possibly) more spectacular, but it didn’t have three chimneys.

“Mind, it could be awful smoky,” recalled former steam engine fireman John Caine, 83, once based nearby at West Auckland shed. “The smoke was a problem, that and the icicles. If you were first through in the morning, the icicles could be five or six inches across.”

On childhood Sundays there’d be main line diversions through there, on weekday evenings a mail train that with luck might be hauled by something named and thus unanonymous.

John Raw, among the quartet who gathered by what clever folk called the aqueduct and the rest of us knew as the water bridge, recalled endless lineside hours train spotting with his bottle of water and his jam sandwiches, remembered dangerous days when a penny might be left on the line, believed that the overgrown embankment might still conceal a cricket ball.

Shildon BR’s cricket ground was nearby. “Ted Sambrooks, huge six, 1983,” said John.

Some of us, indeed, may have walked the tunnel’s length – but only on Sundays when, or so we fervently hoped, there wasn’t a train service. They got way with it in The Railway Children, didn’t they?

John’s joined by the endlessly enthusiastic Jane Hackworth Young, great-great granddaughter of Shildon’s all-time hero and still vigorously involved in promoting the area’s railway heritage.

Jane, who now lives in Teesdale, recalled a photograph of her mini-skirted younger self standing in front of one of the tunnel’s great portals. “It was a very long time ago,” she added.

THE walk proved barely a shunt, the shunt buffered at the railway museum which, in turn, appeared to have forgotten its history. Nothing marked the occasion, the toast proposed in coffee, the banquet an egg mayonnaise butty.

No more heralded – “it’s terribly disappointing how few people remember,” said John Raw – Shildon station was also marking its 175th. An elderly information board recalled that, in 1911, the passenger station had sold 136,879 tickets and the goods yard 15,777 tons of creosote, 5,911 tons of scrap, 4,744 tons of oil, 48 wagons of livestock and 4,588 tons of manure.

That’s some ordure order.

The station information board also reproduced posters about an 1867 engineman’s strike, workers and bosses bandying accusations about whether trains were safe in the hands of the inexperienced.

Amid the encircling gloom of Shildon Tunnel, just days from yet another enginemen’s strike, it was still possible to suppose that there is nothing new under the sun.

OUR old friend Paul Screeton, retired journalist and active seeker of the supernatural, takes a more grounded view as chairman of the Friends of Seaton Carew Station. Writing to The Times in response to a piece extolling wildflowers at Birmingham New Street – “that Stygian horror” – Paul claims to have found 59 different wildflower varieties, two more than HJ Heinz and some fairly rare, within the station’s immediate environs. Others were invited to employ tall poppies syndrome. None to date has outgrown him.

DAVID JOY, that most prolific and accessible of railway authors, has another new title: Rails in the Dales probably speaks for itself.

They’re Yorkshire dales, of course, memories among others of the line which traversed Wensleydale, the shorter branch to Masham, the now-sceptred Settle and Carlisle and the route from Darlington to Richmond.

Particularly, David loved Richmond station, variously describing it as “arguably Britain’s finest branch line terminus”, “astonishingly medieval” and “having few, if any, equals”.

Even the gas works which formed part of the station complex was “an unusually elegant design for such a mundane project”.

Though the last train departed in 1969, the station has been magnificently restored as a business and community centre. It’s doubtless less than coincidental that David speaks there, and promotes the book, on June 7, at 2pm. All Welcome.

n Rails in the Dales, evocatively illustrated, costs £12.50 and is available from bookshops or through the National Park website – retail.yorkshiredales.org.uk

RICHMOND station lasted 123 years, its busiest day on June 29, 1927 when the LNER decided that, with Leyburn, it was the perfect place to view the anticipated total eclipse. Richmond welcomed two sleepers from Kings Cross and other train loads from Marylebone, Kings Lynn and Edinburgh. Disconsolately, they left under a cloud which hadn’t budged all day – but see under “nothing new under the sun”, above.

BACK at the end of October, the column raised a glass to the 50th anniversary of the North Eastern Locomotive Preservation Group, a bunch of mechanical miracle workers.

Now we learn that NELPG has won the Railway Heritage Association’s top award. The citation spoke of “the defining backbone of North-East steam preservation over 50 years”.

Based in Darlington, and with a shed and workshop on the North Yorkshire Moors Railway at Grosmont, the group owns four fully restored steam locos – including dear old Joem, the little engine that could – and has helped restore several others.

“It’s a great honour,” says NELPG secretary Chris Lawson, “the icing on the golden jubilee cake.”

...AND finally in this railway-themed column, the ever-vigilant Peter Sotheran reports from York station that the gent’s on platform four is temporarily closed, signs indicating alternative facilities a caught-short way distant. What particularly tickles Peter – and he sends a photograph – are the little images above the closed door. The gents have their legs crossed. Taking the….? “I kid you not, honest,” he says.