It's been a long wait for railway enthusiasts but they're finally expecting the green light to reopen 12 miles of track on which to run their beloved trains.

PILGRIM'S progress is for no more than 150 yards, along a ten and a quarter inch railway track at Leeming Bar station. "People like it because it goes clacketty-clack," says Alan Cubbin, affectionately.

Pilgrim is a little engine, coal fired and sweetly smelling, with a curtained first class coach called Vanity. Very soon, it's hoped, she will be joined by several big and boisterous brothers.

Leeming Bar was five miles and a few chains down the line from Northallerton to Wensleydale, closed to passengers in 1954 when just two and a half per cent of dales folk were regular users and the train fare was twice as much as the bus.

As at the birth, the brass bands blew for the funeral. Unlike the joyous inauguration - joyous save for the elderly dalesman who condemned railways and "such like foolery" - there were black armbands, a "funeral feast" in the buffet car and a wreath with the simple message "Goodbye, Old Faithful."

Now, however, the railway is about to return. Despite what the Wensleydale Railway Association's magazine calls "an arduous journey through a bureaucratic maze", legalities on a 99-year lease transferring the 22 miles of intact line between Northallerton and Redmire from Railtrack to the Wensleydale Railway Company are believed almost complete.

Trains will be ready to roll soon afterwards. Open days at Leeming Bar station throughout August - Pilgrim an ever-valiant attraction - anticipate a long-awaited green light.

"It's been very frustrating because the anticipated date has been put back several times, but there's a feeling that at last everything is coming together," says Richard Russell, the company's affable administration manager.

At first, perhaps as early as October, trains will cover the 12 miles between Leeming Bar and Leyburn. A little later they hope to replace track westwards to Aysgarth - the company already owns the station by the famous falls - and to resume services east to the main line at Northallerton.

Eventually, though the track beyond Redmire has long been ripped up, they hope fully to reinstate the 40-mile link between the East Coast main line and the Settle and Carlisle Railway at Garsdale.

"Garsdale is very firmly in our plans," insists Richard Russell. "I believe it will happen and I suggest that a lot of our shareholders must. They have invested very nearly £1m so far."

The WRA, from which volunteers are drawn, has 2,700 members across the country. An editorial by a London-based member in the magazine, neatly called Relay, draws comparison with the cleaner at NASA, asked in the 1960s about his job.

He didn't say "I sweep the floor", he said "I'm helping to put a man on the moon."

Cheery helpers - Oh happy band of Pilgrim's, as the hymnist might have said - are much in evidence at Leeming Bar, where the railway once crossed the Great North Road. "I feel like the Emperor Hadrian," says John King, a former railway policeman, meticulously helping restore the portico and station gateway.

Beyond it there's a shop selling everything from Wensleydale Railway fridge magnets to Wensleydale Raiway videos to metal signs headed "Beware: rail enthusiasts' disease." "I know what they mean," says Alan Cubbin, 40 years an Army nurse.

Behind the goods shed a renovated works train awaits new labours, the crane at its head immobile for seven and a half years until Bill Morris got his expert, unpaid, hands on it.

"It took me four whole days just to get a wheel moving," he says. "When we get the go-ahead I'm going to thrash her all the way to Leyburn."

On the other side of the platform, a restaurant car has been handsomely and painstakingly restored. Even the coffee machine, says Richard, works up a fair head of steam.

Steam, it's expected, will head some of the services. There'll also be a three coach diesel multiple unit, a couple of Class 31 diesel locomotives and, possibly, a light railcar from Germany.

Eventually, they hope, services will run every two hours throughout the year, part of an integrated transport system throughout Yorkshire's northern dales. Few now doubt that they'll do it.

"We need a professinal image because we're a plc and have to show that we're capable," says Richard, a former retail manager.

"There's always a lot of scepticism about people planning things like this, but we have some terrific and highly skilled volunteers who have put in an incredible number of hours.

"It's going to release yet more energy when we finally get the go-ahead."

A long wait maybe, but after 48 years the next train out of Leeming Bar may be along any month now.

* The Wensleydale Railway Company stages open days at Leeming Bar station, just off the A1 near Bedale, from 10-4.30pm until September 1 and would greatly welcome volunteers in many areas, including shop and buffet. Details about the Railway, its share scheme and its voluntary opportunites from Richard Russell (01609 779368) or from the WRA, PO Box 65, Northallerton, North Yorkshire, DL7 8YZ.

Still on the permanent way, we hear that ever-anonymous K1 locomotive 62005 - familiar on the North Yorkshire Moors Railway and before that doing mucky jobs on North-East branch lines - is at last to be ennobled.

It will become "Lord of the Isles" when returning later this month to duty on West Highland steam specials between Fort William and Mallaig.

Fred Ramshaw of the North East Locomotive Preservation Group says that the original idea was to name 62005 after an historic chieftain. "We then realised that some of them are still feuding up there. Lord of the Isles seemed safer."

WILF Scott, the Shildon baker's son who masterminded the Buckingham Palace firework spectacular for the Queen's golden jubilee, has been created a Member of the Victorian Order by Her Majesty. Wilf, 55, joins broadcasters, civil servants, pollisses and Alan Jacobi - described as "Managing director, Unusual Services Ltd" - on the personal honours list.

Interviewing him in a pub in Cambridge shortly after the event, we'd forecast royal recognition. Wilf, a former Scorton Grammar School boy now acknowledged as Britain's top pyrotechnician, was doubtful.

"In this job the first thing you're told is not to set half a ton of explosives beneath the Queen, ask her to press the detonator and expect to get away with it," he said.

He did.

Still in Shildon (than which, of course, there is no finer place on earth) last week's note on the centenary of St John's church tower said that no "ringing endorsement" was planned.

If the campanological metaphor may be continued, we dropped a clanger.

Last Friday, 100 years to the day since the Bishop of Richmond (in Surrey) dedicated the landmark tower, a team of eight rang a full peal of Shildon Surprise Major - 5,088 changes taking two hours 53 minutes.

The Shildon Surprise was invented, says Peter Williamson, to commemorate the 150th anniversary in 1984 of the church itself.

Led by David Hird, conductor and eighth bell and with Peter on fifth, the others - as our pull-the-other-one picture shows - were George Deas, John Anderson, Christopher Scott, Karen Maughan, the appropriately named Stephen Bell and Howard Smith.

Last week's column also devoted a paragraph to the 5s and 3s tournament being staged in the Central Borough in Darlington that night in memory of the redoubtable Billy Lynch, landlord for 40 years until 1996.

Among those who read it was 77-year-old Frank Robinson in Thornaby, the Cameron's Brewery rep who'd first given Billy and Ena Lynch the freedom of the Borough.

Frank, lovely chap, came acro ss for old time's sake. We reminisced about Sunshine Corner at Redcar and why the trains always stopped outside Schellenberg's bone yard in South Bank, about Buck Jones - the Boer who was the South Church polliss - and about Bert Dowsey, a one-legged fairground entertainer who'd jump 50 feet into two feet of water.

Too much beneath the bridge, presumably, not even John North readers will remember the daring Mr Dowsey?

Principally, however, we are grateful to Mr Robinson for supplying, hand-written, the words to the ditty about the sexual urge of the camel - trepidantly transferred from the Gadfly column.

The sexual urge of the camel

Is greater than anyone thinks,

In the dead of the night in the desert

It tried to backscuttle the Sphinx.

But the Sphinx's rear passage was stony,

And blocked by the sands of the Nile,

Hence the hump on the back of the camel

And the Sphinx's inscrutable smile.

As for the 5s and 3s, the column squelched into the semi-final, Walter Porritt won (again) and the British Heart Foundation ended the evening £125 better off.

....and finally, it's now little more than a fortnight until John Robinson's attempt to walk 20 miles - barefoot - in aid of breast cancer research.

The column and others will be joining him from Chester Moor to Heighington on Monday, August 26, accompanied - we now learn - by a support van given free by the brothers Beedle, fish and chip purveyors to south Durham's most discerning. The van will contain food, drink - and a nurse.

Journey's end is the Cumby Arms in Heighington where there'll be a day long party, a huge raffle, a psychic and medium who's donating part of her takings and goodness knows what else.

Several kind readers have already sent sponsorship. Other offers - cheques to the Breast Cancer Research Appeal, c/o me at The Northern Echo - would greatly be welcomed. Margaret Wilde (01325 310489) would appreciate offers of raffle prizes, help from local business - and bookings for the psychic.

Other than JR, of course, we'll all be wearing trainers.