Cabin fever at the Fighting Cocks

Moves are afoot to preserve it.

“We were brought up to think that that building had once been stables,” says Norman Hugill who, with his brothers Neil and Ernie grew up in the former station in the 1940s and 1950s. “When we were there, it was the paraffin lamp room. The signalman brought the red and green paraffin lamps out of the signals and cleaned and refilled them in there.”

There are various theories about the many uses of the cabin (below) over the years. Some say it began as an open-fronted waiting room; others that it was a shelter for men patrolling the line. When the front was filled in, it became a toilet.

Norman also points to the little sign outside it in our picture: “Ramps”. Ramps were always stored in pairs. They were 4ft long pieces of shaped metal which were laid beside the wheels of a derailed wagon – one ramp for the left wheels, one ramp for the right wheels. The wagon was then pushed up the ramps and back onto the tracks.

The S&DR opened in 1825 and its original trackbed ran past the Fighting Cocks pub in Middleton St George – as the pub sold tickets, some say that it is the world’s oldest surviving railway ticket office.

In the 1830s, Fighting Cocks station and the cabin were built at a time when there were still some horsedrawn vehicles using the line – so perhaps Norman’s stables theory is correct.

In 1887, a new line into Darlington’s Bank Top station was opened half-a-mile south of Fighting Cocks and so it was reduced to handling goods. It still had its moments, though.

LAST DAY: The Fighting Cocks stationmaster and his team turned out for a photograph on June 30, 1887, which was the last day that the station handled passenger trains. After that, Dinsdale handled passengers and the Cocks dealt with goods. On the left, is a chimney from the ironworks on which Middleton St George's Victorian prosperity was built. Next to the chimney is the top of Squire Henry Cocks' corn mill - its sails were blown off in a storm and so when the picture was taken, it was steampowered

“In 1963, the Simpasture line from Aycliffe to Stillington was closed so they could build the A1, and then there were 30 trains a day coming into Fighting Cocks,” says Norman. “I remember seeing four or five trains nose-to-tail at Oak Tree Junction backing up to Fighting Cocks waiting to get away to Tees Yard.”

His father, Alfred, was a railway platelayer and moved into the station in 1940 with his wife, Elsie. Although it looks an attractive property, it didn’t have many facilities. “The day we got electricity was the day that Tyne Tees Television first broadcast,” says Norman, which dates the electricity supply to January 15, 1959. “When we moved out in 1964, it still didn’t have a bathroom, there was no running hot water and only an outside toilet.”

Despite these privations, the railways never left Norman, who now lives in Stillington, near York. He became the chief signalling inspector for Network Rail and is now head of operations on the North Yorkshire Moors Railway.

His younger brother, Ernie, who lives in Darlington, wasn’t so railway-obsessed and he remembers a non-railway item from their childhood.

There was a level crossing at Fighting Cocks where the S&DR went over the old Roman road of Rykeneild Street. This street was the boundary between two old ecclesiastical parishes: Dinsdale to the west and Middleton St George to the east.

But Ernie remembers that lost in the hedge on the Sadberge side of the crossing was an ancient three-sided boundary stone, with the names of the parishes chiselled into it. But he can’t remember the third name: Morton Palms, perhaps? Can anyone tell us, and what became of the stone?

CLICK HERE for the original Memories article on the history of Fighting Cocks and its station