“Short of a cheese sandwich, a packet of crisps and a small bottle of pop, is there a cheaper three-course lunch – commercially sold – anywhere?”

Folk laud the locos, taunt the town. Hear All Sides – literally, laterally – is under siege from those who suppose that Shildon, like old Marley, is as dead as a doornail.

Admittedly, the shopping centre is – how may this most politely be put? – about 60 years past its sell-by. If that’s the centre, you fear terribly for the extremities.

Yet once all the hot air has evaporated, the steam subsided, the dear old place may have a surprising claim to fame. It offers the cheapest three-course lunch in the land.

Only last week, a survey reported that the average three-course pub lunch has gone up 7.4 per cent to £18.67 and that a three-course restaurant lunch had fallen – fallen, mark you – to £20.66.

At Cafe Limone, three courses – minestrone or potato skins, any pizza or pasta dish followed by ice cream or coffee – is just £3.95, or £4 and a shilling for the meter.

There are chefs who wouldn’t put on a pinny for £3.95, and housewives who wouldn’t suppose it worth turning on the oven.

Cheap and cheerful? Aren’t we all?

“An oasis of great food and fresh wine in a desert of mediocrity,” someone wrote a on a consumer website after a slightly more formal – and more expensive – evening meal.

Formerly it was Andrea Savino’s place, positively drooled over by the Eating Owt column until Andrea’s untimely death in 2007. To say that he was colourful, we observed at the time, was to suggest that Joseph’s dreamcoat was a little bit gaudy.

Now it’s run by a professed Yorkshireman – a Yorkshireman with a Geordie accent – who asks not to be identified. “A proper chef,” said The Boss – remember her? – noticing the burn marks staccatoed down his arms.

The cafe’s in Main Street, which isn’t the main street at all. That’s Church Street. The churches are in Main Street. Clear so far?

It’s also just across the road from Shildon’s now-celebrated war memorial – “the nation’s most photographed other than the Cenotaph in the Whitehall,” said the Boss, perhaps a little extravagantly. It doesn’t half get in the papers, though.

Internally, the cafe is little changed, and almost as cosmopolitan.

There are Italians and eastern Europeans, chirpily about their business. The couple on the next table had accents like Billingsgate fish market.

The place was well-filled, many more seated out of sight around the corner and periodically emerging.

The Boss supposed it to be like a magic porridge pot, an all-purpose expression of which she is particularly fond.

The minestrone – and here the Eating Owt column is momentarily reprised – may not be the most vibrant in history, not even with the addition of copious black pepper and parmesan.

The potato skins are hot, fresh and fine – excoriating as might (or might not) be said in those parts. Nice dips, abundant spuds. There are many places, goodness knows, where a plate of potato skins alone costs more than £3.95.

The pizzas are full-sized, delicious.

Something with anchovies for her and a lucifero, with garlic sausage and chillies, over here.

A pint of beer is £2 50. To add to the economy class occasion, the lady asked for a glass of tap water. Still they kept coming in, still going out.

The atmosphere’s chatty and convivial, Nessun Dorma dormant in the background.

Short of a cheese sandwich, a packet of crisps and a small bottle of pop, is there a cheaper threecourse lunch – commercially sold – anywhere?

Now the Goodbyes are over, it’s worth making Shildon’s re-acquaintance.

NOT a cock stride from Cafe Limone is the Shildon Town Crier office – not, of course, some bell-bashing baritone but the community newspaper.

Jeff Ridley, who edits it, has produced a 15-minute stills DVD of the Great Goodbye, The Final Countdown among the backing music. He was there from the start, photographed the first arrival on the first morning.

“I’m surprised. No one appears to have done nowt of that sort,” says Jeff (as in those parts we do.) It’s very well done, chiefly featuring the incomparable A4s, but also some of Shildon’s other exhibits, the museum’s temporary Cinderellas. It costs £5, plus £1.50 postage. Details by emailing crier@talk21.com or by ringing 01388-775896.

ON similar lines, we have noted the reopening on April 26 – 60 years almost to the day since the last train sadly departed – of the station at Scruton, between Northallerton and Leeming Bar.

Peter Chapman, former head librarian at The Northern Echo, spent a doubtless interesting day on Saturday trying to speed things along.

Peter’s now a retail assistant (paid) at Coseley station, near Wolverhampton, and a volunteer crossing keeper (definitely unpaid) on the Wensleydale Railway. His wife Janet, once a curate at St Cuthbert’s in Darlington, is canon liturgist at Birmingham Cathedral.

Keen to replace Scruton’s five-bar crossing gates with something a little more fitting – more rural – Peter set off to traverse all 530 miles of London Midland’s electrified lines in a day, an odyssey which involved 16 changes.

Clearly forgetting Dr David Jenkins’s dictum about never changing at Birmingham New Street, Peter started there shortly after 6am, planned to finish there at 10.30pm and twice more changed there en route.

The slightly worrying thing – the former Bishop of Durham would understand – is that we haven’t heard from him since.

Did he make it? Did the electrified railway have too many crossed wires? London Midland is adding £1 to every £2 he raises towards the £2,500 cost of Scruton’s gates.

Donations can be made via givey.com/lminaday These gates may reopen next week.

FOR reasons he supposes too arcane to discuss. Redcar and Cleveland councillor David Walsh went onto Amazon to order The Memoirs of Viscount Samuel – as Herbert Samuel, once a local MP. The cheapest of the available copies was “in generally good condition, given age, had library stamps etc” and was “only really suitable for reading use”. So what other purpose, wonders David, would they suggest? ...and finally, it’s Darlington Chrysanthemum and Dahlia Society 75th anniversary, its most celebrated member Albert Hawman – himself a former steam engine driver – who passed 100 in December 2012.

They arranged to have a new chrysanth named after him, can’t now do so until 2015 because insufficient stock is available. Albert, it’s reckoned, has every intention of still being around to admire it.

At any rate, two gentlemen from the society sought a meeting to discuss some anniversary publicity. We meet last week in the pub.

It’s a convivial evening, but for the moment little more can be said. This, it transpires, is only a meeting about a meeting. This is just the seed.