TODAY’S was to have been a Railroad to Wembley column. That it’s not is partly because Saturday’s only two surviving FA Vase ties involved heading in the opposite direction – games they’ve been trying to play for three weeks – and partly because a rail replacement bus was operating between Darlington and Newcastle.

Such things don’t always run smoothly. There are those, indeed, who believe “rail replacement bus” to be the most chilling phrase in the English language.

The match was Marske United v Team Northumbria, finally switched to the student campus because United’s ground – Mount Pleasant, they call it – more greatly resembled the beach.

The bus reached Newcastle Central in an hour and ten minutes, the Metro station beneath so oddly quiet that even the busker – Central Station Metro has the world’s most discordant busker – had taken a buskman’s holiday.

Marske brought their own musician – a drummer, anyway – the gentleman beating to a pulp at his boys’ last moments winner.

The returning bus took precisely 50 minutes start to stop: clean, comfortable, half empty and blessedly free of incessant PA announcements about cheese and onion toasties and disabled passenger alarms sounding. The bus replacement may be irreplaceable.

NEWTON Aycliffe’s FA Vase tie with Atherton had also endured multiple postponements before Tuesday – when at last it was played on the “all-weather” pitch at Durham.

Meanwhile, back at Newton Aycliffe Sports Club, my mate Tommy Taylor – Shildon Boxing Club chairman and former Lib Dem councillor – was holding his 75th birthday party at the Candleliters Folk Club evening, entertainment by the brilliant Old Age Travellers and a great night underlined by news of Aycliffe’s win.

Tommy’s actually 75 today: a very happy birthday, old friend.

THE Northern League’s wild weather is also the incomparable Harry Pearson’s topic in the latest issue of Xtra-time magazine.

Harry talks of coastal grounds exposed to “bracing” gales and of upland grounds “where from October to May winter mist hangs in the air like a bitter marital argument”, but has no doubt which is the bleakest and most bitter of all.

“For skin puckering, nose numbing, ear aching, brass monkey neutering cold, none of these places can compare to Ironworks Road, the windswept and glacial ground of Tow Law Town.”

GEORGE Rogers, one of the biggest and most respected men on the North-East darts scene, has died. He was 67.

Known universally as Podge, he was one of those men who appeared always to be beaming. “I’ve never known him be miserable yet. George always seemed to have something to smile about,” says Doug McCarthy, the county captain when George was Durham’s chairman.

For a big man, adds Doug, George was also remarkably quick around the oche.

George was a Darlington lad, at one time landlord of the Havelock Arms – the affectionately remembered, but long demolished Round House – in Haughton Road. His finest hour may have been reaching the last four of the News of the World tournament at Wembley, beaten – he insisted – because he lost to Dave Lee the toss for first throw.

His funeral was held yesterday at St James the Great church in Darlington, not 100 yards from the pub where always it was service with a smile.

NOTING the death of former Sunderland and Hartlepool United favourite Ambrose Fogarty, last week’s column recalled that he’d spoken – with former Roker Park team-mate Charlie Hurley – at a Brandon United sportsmen’s dinner in 1989.

Amby, we said back then, had played Little to King Charlie’s Large – “a sort of London Irish Tommy Cooper”. Charlie, in turn, had supposed that you never saw a great goalkeeper who was good looking. “Look at Monty, look at Southall. You wouldn’t want to kiss them.”

Bill Fisher, the dinner’s MC and co-organiser, remembers it for different reasons – mainly that Amby was an Irishman not possessed of the gift of the gab. “I called on him and sat down. My backside had hardly touched the chair before Amby was back on the one next to me. He’d said something about everyone having come to hear Charlie and sat down again. I was shell-shocked. We’d paid £1,000 for the pair of them and I was worried that we’d have to pay back the punters. With 320 in the room it would have financially ruined the club.”

By no means for the first time, Charlie Hurley saved the day.

….and finally, the four cricketers to have scored more than 2,000 Test runs, taken more than 200 Test wickets and held at least 100 catches (Backtrack, January 7) are Gary Sobers, Jacques Kallis, Shane Warne and – of course – the Laird of Ravensworth.

Readers are today invited to name the only lower league team to have beaten Arsenal in the FA Cup during Arsene Wenger’s 19 years as manager.

The column returns next week – hopefully from the Railroad to Wembley and, hopefully, heading in the right direction.