THEY should, of course, have had a queue-jumping protocol for us natives, perhaps upon receipt of the answer to a couple of simple questions.

At what time did the mail train come through six nights a week, perhaps – oh, come on, twenty past six, you could have set your H Samuel by it. Or, by what serial soubriquet was the primary school named after the great railway pioneer and Sans Pareil builder Timothy Hackworth disrespectfully known, Tin Tacks. Still is. Philistines.

As it was, we filed patiently at Locomotion in Shildon, we and the rest of the world, only too happy to join the valediction, the huge human wave that was the Great Goodbye.

Were those six A4 locomotives sentient, had they breathed fire and lived, as so many seemed to suppose, perhaps the wait would simply have been an act of revenge (which, as someone once observed, is a dish best served cold.) Perhaps the steam engines we knew as streaks would have remembered all those summer Sundays when engineering work between Durham and Darlington meant that main line services were re-routed through Shildon.

Diversions, they called them, though for us short-trousered, trainspotting terrors, the diversion was wholly mutual.

Unlike unsuspecting passengers suddenly finding themselves hurried beneath Shildon tunnel, we’d seen it all – or at least almost all of the A4s – before.

So we hurled great verbal spanners into their wonderful works, especially those with the misfortune to be shedded at Gateshead, a timeless example of all that is said about familiarity and contempt.

Mind, the A4s weren’t such a beautiful blue, or glorious green, in those days. Rather they were black, or sometimes what Shildon lads called hacky black. Last week, they were chiefly garter blue, and they were utterly, unforgettably beautiful.

MAYBE 500 – 500 and a teddy bear – are at Darlington station, awaiting the 10.54 down the single-track branch line to Shildon. Usually there are about a dozen.

Though it’s half term, most appear either to be under five – in which case they would probably expect the A4s to be called Thomas or Edward or Gordon – or over 65, in which case they were relishing their second childhood, anyway.

Those in between probably believe an A4 to be a sheet of paper or, worse yet, insist upon calling Mallard and her sisters “trains.”

For them, like Sisyphus and his blessed boulder, the only condign punishment would be almost to reach the head of the queue and then eternally to be shunted back whence they began.

The 500 have rations to feed the 5,000, an additional rucksack pocket for the Thermos flask. Also within will be a copy of an elderly Ian Allan’s locospotters’ handbook, dog eared and antediluvian, and probably a metallic name strip, laboriously hammered out on a 1950s railway platform.

It’s a bit reminiscent of the workmen’s club trips of yore, only without the egg and tomato sandwiches. (Egg and tomato sandwiches were de rigeur on such annual occasions.) The train is twice the normal capacity and still it overflows.

Passengers even join at Heighington, possibly for the first time since the munitions factory closed.

The conductor turns cabaret.

“Soon you’ll all be getting off at Shildon and we’ll have a nice quiet train again,” she announces.

Shildon’s thronged – wick with folk, as they say. There may not have been so many there since the night the Hippodrome opened (and that was 1910). The surrounding roads are also pretty much choked, they reckon. It’s impossible not to feel a little bit proprietorial, and an awful lot proud.

AS always at Locomotion, entry is free. Peter Everett, also in attendance with our kidder, wonders perceptively how many fewer might have turned out had it been a nominal £1.

Pete’s also a bit miffed to be invited to pay £4 for a venison burger. “I’m not paying that, it’s dead deer,” he says.

Designed by Sir Nigel Gresley – or Sir Nigel Gridley, as the following day’s Times egregiously supposes – the locomotives are magnificent. It’s the closest we’ve been since the irresponsible days of leaving a penny on the line and scarpering pretty sharp thereafter.

A proud old ex-railwayman guides his little grandson around, stopping wistfully by Dwight D Eisenhower, and Bittern and Union of South Africa. “Some of these are even older than your granddad,” he says.

It’s expertly planned and ably marshalled, perhaps the only problem that the fish and chip wagon is about ten yards from the gently sussurating Sir Nigel Gresley itself, the whiff of nostalgia overcome by the smell of cod and six.

Probably back in LNER days there’d have been a bye-law against it: only fish and chips fried on the footplate to be eaten within 100 yards of an A4. When we have all come to praise famous men, it seems an abomination before the laud.

Three or four of them are in what railwaymen call light steam. “All fired up,” someone says, though nowhere near as fired up as those of us back sentimentally to hearth and home.

WE queue for half an hour to take a turn on Sir Nigel’s footplate. The words of a 1975 song recorded by a Methodist youth group to mark the Stockton and Darlington Railway’s 150th anniversary come indelibly, inevitably, return: And who needs Presley when you’ve got Nigel Gresley He’ll convert you quicker than old John Wesley ONE of the stewards says that he’d been stopped the day previously by a neighbour in Shildon who wondered if anything special was going on. “I don’t know what planet some people live on,” he says.

Sir Nigel has the fire on, like they’re expecting visitors. Some of the internal workings won’t be originals, of course, not least the collecting box welded above the firebox door.

Perhaps they’d make a bit more by offering toasted teacakes, or installing a portable television so that cab cruisers might have five minutes with Countdown.

The other slight disappointment is that they’re not allowed to sound their distinctive, almost diuretic whistles. Someone suggests it might be a bit cacophonous: not to a musical ear, it wouldn’t. As Sherlock might have said, it’s a bit like the dog that didn’t bark in the night.

The returning diesel multiple unit is appropriately named Timothy Hackworth, though it’s possible that the plate is temporary and been stuck on with Velcro. It’s the sort of day that will live forever in the memory: as we used to say at Tin Tacks, sans pareil.