UNABLE to attend last Saturday’s formal launch of the Bishop Auckland Rail Heritage Trail – shouldn’t there be local bylaws forbidding such events on football days? – the column entrained thence three days earlier. Trail blazing, as it were.

It’s familiar territory. We went to school there, started work (for £9 1s 6s a week) in the shoestring office above the money lender’s, spent the surplus one-and-a-tanner on a payday pint in the Cumberland Arms, around the corner.

None of these historic sites seems yet to have been graced with a blue plaque. The town’s railway heritage is being more enthusiastically acknowledged.

The old passenger station, platforms on three sides, saw services in all directions – “a veritable spider’s web,” says one of half-a-dozen information boards now within 300 yards. The extensive goods sidings puffed and chuffed immediately behind the main street, Victorian supply lines ran down Railway Street and elsewhere to engineering and locomotive building works.

“The industrial quarter,” says the boards. Folk like to imagine quarters these days. They don’t do things by halves.

The driving force is Gerald Slack of the Auckland Railways group, who in recent years has written several local history books. The next, it’s hoped before Christmas, will be on Shildon’s formative years.

As befits someone for whom such passions are pretty much akin to a love affair, Gerald’s in the habit of making inanimate objects feminine. “She was a lovely old spot,” he says, of the signal box which towered over the goods yard. “The world was very much different in those days.”

So he leads the way, stops by Halford’s, akimbo to acknowledge the site of the goods depot, stops to marvel at the Hippodrome in Railway Street, now a bingo hall. “She’s a gorgeous little girl,” says Gerald.

Opened as a music hall in 1909, bankrupt within two years, the Hippodrome became one of 196 Essoldo cinemas owned by Newcastle boxing promoter Sol Scheckman.

We’re allowed to eyes down, the still-curtained theatre boxes offering a unique vantage for play, a “Book sales” kiosk presumably not offering Mills and Boon. In 1909 the capacity was 1,800; now around a dozen are sociably gathered at noon, the multi-skilled eating their dinner with one hand while checking off numbers with the other.

The town’s first station was built in 1843. These days it’s a single platform, again manned, service frequency along the line to Darlington and Saltburn expected almost to double in December.

Gerald adds to Northern Rail’s by buying a 10p season ticket in order that his photograph might be taken. “There’s so much railway history in Bishop Auckland,” he says. “I’m just hoping that this will help folk realise it.”

SEDGEFIELD’S parish church is very large: last Friday, on what would have been his 87th birthday, Bert Draycott’s funeral wholly overflowed it. We squeezed into the children’s corner, next to the snowman; Fishburn miners’ banner paraded outside.

Bert was world spoons playing champion. The initials WCSP were in his death notice in the paper, are on his “brick” at the miners’ memorial in Fishburn.

Global domination? “Oh aye,” he’d reply, “they’d come from Newton Aycliffe and all ower.”

Bert was also a much loved folk singer, raconteur, wood carver, stock car racer, painter, proud pitman and new age kurler and a devoted father and grandfather – “a man with a smile on his face and fire in his belly,” said the Rev Pauline Fellows, a relative and Methodist minister.

The service reflected it all quite brilliantly, a time of songs and of laughter, of applause, of sadness and of wonderful memories. A few days earlier he’d been due to be the turn at the Sun Inn folk club in Stockton. They held a tribute night instead.

Pauline reminded us that, like Bert, Jesus was a master storyteller. But, she added, the Messiah probably didn’t play the spoons.

BERT always took to the stage in a bowler. Stan Patterson, who has died aged 92, was another familiar with such hat tricks – though equally comfortable in a fez.

Stan was a Laurel and Hardy man, first saw them at Sunderland Empire in 1952 – “bus trip from West Auckland” – became Grand Sheikh (hence the fez) of the Bishop Auckland tent of the Sons of the Desert.

He campaigned for the statue of Stan Laurel on the Eden Theatre corner, is also still remembered for the 1973 FA Cup semi-final between Sunderland and Arsenal at Sheffield Wednesday. Stan had forgotten his ticket: the bus was at Wetherby before a kindly neighbour overtook it.

His wife Nora was a court usher, cheery and compassionate, in the good old days of Bishop magistrates.

We’d last seen Stan at a Laurel and Hardy convention in Ulverston, the thin one’s birthplace. He wore Laurel and Hardy braces and carried a pineapple. Another delegate wore a gorilla suit and an electric blue mini-skirt. None of it was satisfactorily explained.

He was a smashing chap, his funeral at Wear Valley crematorium, is at 1pm tomorrow.

WEAR Valley crem at noon on Friday will witness the funeral of Keith Kyte, who with his wife Jackie showed that vision, hard graft and personality can still make a pub a success.

They’d arrived at the 350-year-old Red Lion at North Bitchburn, on a back road between Bishop Auckland and Crook, in 1989. He was a Londoner, Spurs supporter, she from Newcastle. The pub was on the bones of its backside.

The Eating Owt column discovered it in 1992. Within months it had been named our pub of the year. Already it was booming, brilliantly and eccentrically revived. “If this is the recession, I hope we can have another next year,” said Keith.

By 1996 the bar top was wick with awards – “more citations than a VCs’ reunion,” the column supposed – reasonably allowing the Kytes to rebrand the place “The famous Red Lion”, to commission a new sign incorporating Keith’s hirsute head and to claim a roaring trade.

They retired in 2007, moved a mile across the valley to Witton Park. Keith was 70.

...AND finally, three more railway lines on which to finish:

  • North Eastern Locomotive Preservation Group man Fred Ramshaw offers abject apology for dear old Joem’s last minute non-appearance on the Wensleydale Railway (last week’s column.) The engine, says Fred, had developed a firebox problem. Then again, haven’t we all?
  • The neighbours who so wonderfully look after Commondale station, on the Middlesbrough to Whitby line – the column three weeks back – failed to take the top station preservation award. The same article said that the once-thriving Commondale brickworks had been run between 1872-1947 by the Crossley family. Jo Crossley, who lives in Melsonby, near Richmond, points out that her grandfather was Alfred, not Anthony. Apologies.
  • On the day that the A1 Steam Locomotive Trust announced ambitious plans to move to a new base in Darlington, The Times carried an apology of its own. The previous day they’d included a picture of Tornado with the caption that parts of Britain’s rail infrastructure were older than the steam engine. “It should more accurately have said ‘most of Britain’s rail infrastructure’,” they confessed. “The Tornado locomotive was completed in 2008.”