Last orders may have been called at the Black Bull, but it’s not the end of the line for Hazel

IT’S barely 9am and getting on half the village – that is to say about 11 people – are there to wave off the last train from Moulton.

She is called Hazel, properly just a single carriage from the fabled Brighton Belle, and for Hazel, at least, it will not be the end of the line.

Moulton’s near Scotch Corner, the Black Bull pub/restaurant once among the North-East’s best known and certainly its most garlanded.

Hazel, once elegant, was the restaurant car out the back. “Moulton?

This was damn near incandescent,”

the Eating Owt column had observed, approvingly.

We told in February how the Bull had closed without warning, how it had a hand-written note in the window about reopening in the summer, how Philip Barker – the owner – was one of eight men facing charges involving alleged mortgage frauds totalling £30m.

Now it was summer, late summer, and the Bull remained forlornly out to grass. Hazel, however, has been bought by the 5Bel Trust, a charity which hopes before 2013 is out to restore a five-car Brighton Belle Pullman set to main line operation.

Such formations are called rakes.

This was progress indeed.

HAZEL had been bought by Black Bull owners George and Audrey Pagendam after the Brighton Belle ceased running in 1972. Mr Barker’s company bought the pub in 2006.

Now two huge cranes are once again manoeuvring her onto the back of a lorry, tangoing tentatively like giraffes on a blind date.

Though the operation appears complex, the workmen prove greatly affable, never a cross word and even allowing the bairns to sit in the lorry cab. It’s probably what’s meant by civil engineering.

A couple who became engaged there are also back to bid Hazel adieu. Sadly they have marked their coupon with a cross, and decline publicity.

“It’ll be a good age,” someone says, and though it should never be revealed of a lady, Hazel is 78.

Job done, the lorry – “abnormal load,” it says, by way of extra-wide understatement – inches out of the car park, somehow squeezes past the little village chapel and crawls the narrow mile to the A1 before heading for restoration in Derbyshire.

Hazel will have had faster trips, the driver not expecting other road users to bless his name. “Give it half an hour,” he says, “and we’ll be all over Radio 2.”

DESCRIBED as an art deco icon, the Brighton Belle first ran on June 29, 1934, and was the world’s only all-electric Pullman.

The 51-mile non-stop journey from London took around an hour.

The 15 carriages ran in five-car sets, usually with two sets coupled and the third awaiting its turn. They had names like Vera, Mona, Doris and Gwen.

Some have been restored for the Venice Simplon Orient Express, others are on heritage railways. The five-car restoration, one of Britain’s biggest projects of its kind, is expected to cost around £2m.

Moulton bids farewell with mixed feelings. The pub remains closed, grows shabby, has something about it of the Marie Celeste. Mr Barker’s case will not be heard before the new year.

Hazel, too, had become a little incongruous, a little unloved, out the back. Soon it will all change. The ugly duckling will again be the Belle of the ball.