KIRBY MAINS has died, a slight and stooped man of 85 quite literally blown off his feet by the wind.

For 60 years, maybe longer, he was familiar to readers of North-East newspaper letters columns as RK Mains, a windmill tilter in a great and honourable tradition.

I recall writing back to him while still at school, in his capacity as secretary of the Railway Invigoration Society – he may even have founded it – and which appears no longer to exist.

Kirby’s other passions were cricket, football and real ale, chiefly on Tyneside though he was familiar at Durham County matches at Chester- le-Street. Newcastle Camra, of which he was a founder member, even named a bar in his honour at their last beer festival. Many much enjoyed his company, and his craic.

On Saturday, April 5, a particularly wild and wet and windy afternoon, the indomitable Kirby caught the 308 bus from Jesmond to watch the Ebac Northern League match between Whitley Bay and Team Northumbria. On his way out of the ground after the final whistle, he was lifted off his feet by a particularly violent gust of wind and suffered a broken shoulder. He died in hospital last week.

An internet search reveals that one of his last letters was in 2009, protesting at the withdrawal of the morning train from Newcastle to Chathill – formerly known as Chathill for Seahouses – in north Northumberland.

It had enabled a day’s coastal walking but left the 17.20 as the day’s only stopping train, the return service just 47 minutes later and not even a real ale pub near the tiny station.

“Alternatively,” wrote Kirby, drily, “I could stay overnight and return on the 07.07 the next morning. I find neither option feasible.”

A check on the summer 2014 timetable reveals that the morning train from Newcastle to Chathill has been reinstated though the notion of a trip in his memory – the Mains line, as it were – had swiftly to be aborted.

It leaves Newcastle at 5.55am, long before the first connecting train from the south. Doubtless a little busier, the return from Chathill is at 7.06. STILL on track, the column two weeks ago noted that the 50th anniversary of the closure of the line from Darlington through Barnard Castle to Middleton-in-Teesdale falls on November 28 this year. The lines were lifted almost immediately.

Just hours after the column’s appearance, we were stopped in Middleton Tyas, near Scotch Corner, by a white van man seeking directions to Mickleton, the last stop before Middletonin- Teesdale. No matter the crew were heading in diametrically the wrong direction, the van belonged to Network Rail.

Ahead of the anniversary, is there something that the railways aren’t telling us?

...and finally, Another Publication has asked me to review the Oxford Dictionary of Journalism. I’m not in it, not even in the “selective index of people”. That’s all you need to know.