“PUSHUS No 20,000,” says the side of the strange contraption photographed by the Old Skipper in Darlington’s South Park in the early 1930s.

What could it mean?

Of course, Memories readers knew.

Pamela Pinkney, David Burniston and Colin Bainbridge were among those who got in touch, and Mark Cooper explained it succinctly. “‘Push-us’ is a play on words,” he said. “In 1929, Sir Nigel Gresley designed and built a high pressure loco at Darlington works. It was No10,000, had a unique boiler and because it was a secret development, it was nicknamed ‘hush hush’.

“It was a really handsome and unique loco. At the end of its life, the boiler was used at North Road works as a steam generator.

“As a child, I remember a scale model of Hush Hush on display in the window of the museum in Tubwell Row. It's now on display in the North Road museum.”

Gresley started work on an experimental high pressure water tube boiler in the mid-1920s in a bid to build a faster and more efficient engine to give his employers, the London and North Eastern Railway (LNER), a competitive advantage.

The boiler was an American idea, and for the Gresley’s version, forgings were made in Sheffield, and the frame and boiler in Glasgow. They were transported to Doncaster for partial assembly, and in October 1929, the semi-completed loco was moved to Darlington’s North Road workshops for the finishing touches to be applied.

Because the half-built No 10,000 was so experimental, when it was transported on the public tracks, it was covered in a sheet to prevent competitors’ prying eyes seeing its secrets.

The Northern Echo, though, learned the clandestine arrival at the North Road shops – where Morrisons’ supermarket is today – and wrote about the “hush-hush” loco. The name stuck.

The Hush-Hush first ran on December 12, 1929, and after six months of trials, it entered service. With a corridor tender, to allow a change of crew in the cab, it ran non-stop from London to Edinburgh.

But for all its ingenuity, its reliability wasn’t great. Of its first 1,888 days in service, 1,105 were spent in the North Road works for repairs.

On August 21, 1935, after it had covered 90,000 miles, Gresley ordered it to stop running. It reappeared in 1937 with its experimental boiler replaced by a conventional fire tube boiler. In this guise, it continued in service until June 1, 1959, when it was withdrawn and broken for scrap at Doncaster.

Its experimental high pressure boiler, though, outlived it, remaining at the North Road shops for testing until 1965.

So what is going on in our photograph? It was taken by the Old Skipper – Frederick James Rayner, whose pictures have appeared in Memories 228 and 229 – and it shows a float in a Railwaymen’s Carnival. The young lads are clearly having a topical laugh at the railway’s expense – but what is the secret motive force beneath their sheet? One Memories’ correspondent suggests that it is nothing more experimental than a lame donkey that is under there pulling the carriage.

RECENT Memories have been wandering around old Newgate Street in Bishop Auckland, so let’s add a railway flavour to those reminiscences.

John Askwith, archivist with the Weardale Railway Trust, has kindly sent in these pictures of the old Station Approach. It was at the southern end of Newgate Street, and has now been obliterated by Morrisons’ supermarket.

The first train arrived at Bishop Auckland’s station on November 8, 1843, and soon afterwards, the town found itself in the centre of a web of railways from which you could go to all points of the compass: north-west to Crook, south to Shildon and Darlington, west to Frosterley, north to Durham, south-east to Barnard Castle, and north-east to Spennymoor and Ferryhill.

To accommodate all these disparate directions, by 1867, the station had become a very unusual triangular shape, with three central platforms dispatching the rail traffic.

However, the minerals which passed through the station were more important than the passengers standing on those stations. Bishop was central to the movement of Durham coal and coke and Cumberland iron ore to the blast furnaces of Teesside to the east and Workington to the west.

Perhaps because so much was going on at the station, it needed such a wide Station Approach. John’s pictures were taken by the British Railways Photographic Unit from York in 1971.

The one of the north side shows the Station Approach Garage in a low building which, in the late 1880s, the North Eastern Railway erected as the stables and keeper’s house – in those days, of course, all the merchandise that arrived at the station had to be moved around the town and the dale by horsepower. Perhaps even the green bananas, direct from Jamaica via Liverpool docks, were delivered by these horses to the Browns and Harrisons banana-ripening houses in Peel Street, as Memories 227 mentioned.

The site of the station car park – two shillings a day in John’s 1971 photo – is where Halford’s is today. “The North Eastern Railway District Engineers’ offices were on the left,” he says. “They were later used as class rooms for Bishop Auckland Technical College and finally the Driving Test Centre.”

John adds: “I am looking for a photo taken around 1971 from Station Approach looking at the Wear Valley Hotel, to complete the all-around picture of the site. Can anybody help?”

The closest Memories can come is a 2002 picture of a very sad looking hotel. In its day, the Wear Valley was one of the town’s principal watering holes, but after it closed in 1991, it was twice attacked by arsonists. It was derelict for a decade before it was demolished in 2002, and Hewitts solicitors moved into their new offices on the site the following year.

FROM the Archive in Memories 227 turned the spotlight on Staindrop, and we were particularly taken by a 1955 photograph that we found in The Northern Echo archive showing a face staring from a wall.

Enid Wallace responded to our appeal for information. “The face is on the gable end of the cottage next to the church gates,” she said, “and there should also be a limb somewhere nearby.

“When I was growing up in the 1950s and 1960s in Staindrop, the story was that someone had either jumped or fell from the church many years ago. How true this is, I don't know.”

So, are there any Staindrop people – Staindropians? – who can tell us about the stony face in the wall?

AN exhibition of past and present photographs of the Stockton and Darlington Railway is being held today at Middleton Hall Retirement Village, near Darlington.

The exhibition is entitled The Line Through Time, and is part of the Darlington Arts Festival. It features more than 75 images, many of which were taken by the retirement village’s photography club. Middleton Hall, near Middleton St George, is handily placed for the 1825 trackbed of the Stockton and Darlington Railway.

The exhibition opens this morning at 10.30am, with a welcome from the mayor of Darlington, Councillor Gerald Lee, and a performance by the Fishburn Academy Band. It runs until 5pm with the Friends of the line giving a talk about their work at 4pm.

Admission is free, and everyone is welcome, but please call the village on 01325-332207 to reserve a ticket.