THE Friends of North Road Railway Museum – it has many, as the upper or lower case may be – presented an illustrated talk by the excellent Mr Chris Nettleton on steam around York.

There was also a silent movie of the Stockton and Darlington Railway centenary celebrations in 1925. “If I’d had anything about me, I’d have brought someone to play the piano,” said Chris.

The main event would once itself have been a magic lantern display, then a slide show and was now a power-point presentation though Chris – a man who could probably not just build a steam engines, but teach it to sit up and beg – appeared to be having trouble with the mouse, the sort of thing that L/Cpl Jones (or was it Mr Yateman, the verger?) called the vicar’s clicker.

His enthusiasm can’t be faulted, though. In late-September 2013 he’d turned up precisely one year early for his own talk and had gently to be advised of a small fault in his timetable.

He’s a Sir Nigel Gresley man, holds several offices in the burgeoning Gresley Society, drives a car with the registration V2 HNG. Class V2s were Herbert Nigel Gresley’s most numerous design.

The last time we were in the museum, in Darlington, its future was uncertain. Now it’s been saved, or at least reprieved, attention turning to the neglected appearance of the brick train on Darlington’s outskirts. Down like a ton of bricks? Absolutely.

Chris, 72, was a train-spotter from childhood. Raised in Darlington, now in Eaglescliffe, he roamed the railways with his £25 Kodak, benign officialdom usually forgiving him his trespasses.

Many locos were named after racehorses. Lemberg, which forms the first part of Chris’s email address, won the 1910 Derby.

Others had names like Airborne, Herringbone, Robert the Devil and Night Hawk, though the latter became so familiar on diversions through Shildon that we dirty-kneed denizens called it something else entirely.

Another was called Gay Crusader. “It was a lovely name back then,” said Chris.

Many remained proudly pristine. The mucky ones, it was said, came chiefly from theNewcastle shed. If cleanliness is next to godliness, then Newcastle was Robert the Devil.

About 30 attended, the car park full, but the overflow overestimated. Remembering his train-spotting days, at least one had brought pop and sandwiches. The unbefriended paid £2: memory line proved well worth the excursion.

WHEN it comes to joining things, I’m generally with Groucho Marx, who famously observed that he wouldn’t want to belong to any organisation that would accept him as a member. The Gresley Society is an honourable exception, and there’s big news afoot.

A statue of Sir Nigel, with a rather lower case mallard at his feet, will be unveiled at the reborn Kings Cross station on April 5, 2016, the 75th anniversary of the great man’s death.

He was chief mechanical engineer of the LNER, his offices at Kings Cross to be acknowledged in the attendant plaque. “Here were conceived handsome locomotives and beautiful trains.”

Mallard, of course, was the most celebrated of all – named, not wholly coincidentally, because Gresley would feed the mallard ducks on the moat of his Hertfordshire home.

It’s the feathered sort which will sit at his feet in the 120 per cent scale statue – the duck designed with strengthened internal supports in the certain knowledge that children will play on it. Sir Nigel steams yet.

YORK, said Chris Nettleton, was a train-spotters’ paradise. It’s thus nicely coincidental that the Stokesley Stockbroker not only sends a link to a BBC website about the train-spotting exhibition at the National Railway Museum, but that the man identified as “perhaps the world’s first train-spotter” is Jonathan Backhouse, one of Darlington’s finest.

An appropriate venue, we meet to discuss these things over a pint at the Station in Northallerton. The flat screen not only encourages folk to eat their puddings, but has an app link to the railway station departure board, a quick sprint away.

The exhibition, at any rate, includes Backhouse’s wildly enthusiastic letter to his sister following the opening of the Stockton and Darlington Railway. There’s a rather nifty drawing, too.

Since there’d only ever been one train, to claim that it made him a train-spotter seems about as fanciful as supposing that one swallow makes a summer.

Besides, Backhouse – banker, backer, Quaker and master of Polam Hall – was also the S&D’s treasurer. It certainly needed the money.