AGAIN the Railroad to Wembley runs improbably. Two Ebac Northern League teams, Marske United and Stockton Town, are in the FA Vase fifth round last Saturday and both at home.

Six or seven of us head from Darlington to Marske, the morning so meteorologically miserable that the first half hour’s spent discussing illness – piles, particularly – and the second debating how many sausages make a sandwich.

The consensus is that the minimum should be three, and that Mrs May’s standing would be much enhanced were she to introduce a statutory sausage butty.

In truth we’re headed first to Saltburn, where there’s an upcoming concert by the Kildale Quartet – about 50 per cent of the population of that Esk Valley settlement – before walking back along the dog-barking, see fretting beach to Marske.

Someone passes the time by inviting the only number which can be written with all the letters in alphabetical order – forty – another asks us to identity the sport with the most UK fatalities. It’s fishing, honestly. They keep on dropping off the perch.

Marske is reached within the hour, the Ship shortly afterwards. It’s still not a very nice day.

Officially it’s Marske-by-the-Sea, the hyphens obligatory but the name misleading. A stranger might do several laps of Marske without witnessing so much as a whelk stall, much less parading the prom.

The greater issue, however, is whether it’s a town or a village.

Marske has six pubs, four churches, four schools, two railway stations (Marske and Longbeck), a busy retail centre and, last time anyone counted, more than 8,000 residents. Most insist they’re still villagers.

Wikipedia reckons no firm guidelines on such debates, adds – more or less – that the media make it up as they go along, anyway.

England’s largest claimant to village status is reckoned to be Ecclesfield, population 32,000 and now so greatly part of Sheffield that they might as well relocate the City Hall there.

Kidlington, Oxford, has a population of 15,000 and a parish council which insists it’s England’s second largest village, though it declines to reveal where the winner lies.

In the Ship Inn opinion’s divided, but by 4.45pm Marske still hope to have painted the town yellow.

Just up the road is Winkie’s Castle, a tiny folk museum named after the next-door cobbler’s cat. Beyond the shopping centre is a micro-pub simply called Biggles.

Captain W E Johns, author of 95 books about James Bigglesworth, was stationed with the Royal Flying Corps at Marske exactly 100 years ago – and, by every account, by no means as deadly as his fictional hero.

At Marske-by-the-Sea, officially the No 2 School of Air Fighting, Bill Johns was a probationary second lieutenant with a reputation for going out with a prang.

The bath house, the CO’s house, several hangars and even the hospital all had bits shot off them by Johns’s aimless artillery. “From the number of crashes he had, it would appear that he was more of a liability than an asset to the Allied cause,” wrote his biographer in 1993.

Had the number of Allied aircraft he destroyed been German, the biography added, he would certainly have qualified for the description “ace.”

The pub has a boarded up window. Could it be that Biggles flies again?

The pre-match conversation turns to the familiar question of whether Carlisle’s east of Edinburgh. It is, oddly enough, but W E Johns might never himself have known.

United have had a very good Vase record in recent years and the column has had some memorable away days in their company.

In 2001, managed by Cleveland police inspector Charlie Bell, they won 1-0 at Marlow, the Buckinghamshire home of Sir Stephen Redgrave. As usual, it bucketed. “Had Sir Steve taken to the Oak Tree Road ground with a coxless four,” the column observed, “he’d probably have won another gold medal.”

Marlow’s affluent, the programme suggesting that visitors might find the price of a pint excessive– it was £2 – but the wine shop offering a third off all champagne. The Marlow Free Press (40p) had free Jaffa cakes with every copy.

Marske’s chairman was John Hodgson, a hirsute painter and decorator who’d first played for the club at 14, held the appearance record – 476 games, 88 goals – and had notoriously written in the club programme that they hadn’t done badly for a “poxey little club with a scrapyard ground.”

The Western League website was slightly kinder after Saturday’s game – “areas which were significantly second hand,” it said.

What really peeved United was that Hodgy might have been the only painter and decorator on Teesside who couldn’t even spell poxy.

Nine years later they were at Whitehawk, Brighton, on the sort of early March day that made the Mole shout “Bother” and “Oh Blow”, throw down his whitewash brush and head for the wide world.

Brighton had just been named the LGBT capital of Britain. In Marske they probably thought that LGBT was the winning combination in the cricket club letter draw.

Though much in evidence, Hodgy was no longer chairman. The night previously he’d been refused admission to a gay club. “The bouncer said he didn’t think it was my type of place,” he said.

Another of the lads carried the biggest cowbell since the Durham Ox was fitted with an audible warning system. Marske lost the replay.

Shildon were also in fifth round action that day, their 18th successive away tie probably an all-time record. This season they lost to Marske. Away, of course.

In Brighton they attract an estimated eight million visitors a year. In Marske they’re still trying to find the beach.

Last Saturday they host Bradford Town, to be confused neither with City nor Park Avenue but a former woollen mill town for all that.

This is Bradford-upon-Avon, Wiltshire home to the rugby playing likes of Will Carling and Phil de Glanville and to a Western League football club known inexplicably as the Bobcats.

The crowd’s 383 – Stockton attract almost twice as many – including the locally renowned Surreal Neil, erstwhile collector of telephone exchanges.

Neil’s helped fork the pitch. “Like running through sago,” he reports confidently, in the manner of a great chieftain of the pudding race.

It’s United’s first home game since December 23. On February 13 they not only hope to entertain Stockton but ITN political editor Robert Peston and a crew anxious to talk to players and spectators about “local identity and jobs.”

In the Ship Inn they may talk about little else.

The prolific Danny Earl gives Marske a 25th minute lead, prompting someone to phone home to ask who sang Duke of Earl, a hit in the sixties. Gene Chandler, it’s reported.

Early in the second half he hits another through the gloaming, enough comfortably to take Marske into the quarter-finals for the third time in the club’s history.

Stockton Town will again be at home, to Windsor, while Marske will travel on February 24 to Bracknell, in Berkshire.

The Railroad to Wembley will be doing something that it hasn’t for almost a year; it will be heading in the right direction.