COLESHILL is a north Warwickshire town of 6,000 or so souls, 15 minutes by train from Birmingham New Street (of which more, nervously, anon). Unlike in the North-East, they play football there.

The Romans occupied it, the Saxons knew it and the town was so familiar to the Victorians – on the coach route from London to Manchester – that there were more than 20 inns.

Times change. These days weary travellers may be guided by a website called “The top ten pubs in Coleshill”, though the “ten” are as far away as Birmingham, Coventry and Sutton Coldfield.

The town’s also close to Meriden, once regarded as the geographical heart of England, though that’s now reckoned to have been a marketing wheeze by an enterprising 18th century landlord of the Bulls Head.

The centre’s there or thereabouts, anyway. Coleshill was Middle England before Middle England was invented.

Last Saturday, Coleshill Town played Dunston UTS in the FA Vase fourth round, the last 32, the winners away to either Newport (Isle of Wight) or Ashford.

Malcolm James, the Ebac Northern League club’s long-serving chairman, hoped that it would be Newport. “I always said we’d be in Europe one day,” he added.

The clubs had met at the same stage two years earlier, but on Tyneside – Coleshill to Newcastle, or near enough – but now were on the Midland Football League club’s 3G pitch, a synthetic surface commonly but misleadingly known as all-weather.

It may not quite be all-weather, but there’s a lot more chance of playing on a 3G than on six inches of mud. The game was on. The Railroad to Wembley left Darlington on the five past nine.

OUTSIDE the station, a great rainbow fleet of buses indicates that, once again, there are to be no trains north of Darlington. The bus coachwork speaks of faraway places with strange-sounding names. None mentions Newcastle.

The train’s fine, though soon wick with folk (as probably they say in Dunston.) A young mum’s travelling with her five-year-old son. “Just wait till I tell your daddy how useless he is,” she says. It sounds familiar.

Periodically we hear from the Northern League, games tumbling like sodden skittles. Even the match on Consett’s 3G is postponed. Their 3Gs are more clement than our 3Gs.

Soon, yet another Saturday fixture list is reduced to just one match. It’s at bosky Darlington RA.

BIRMINGHAM New Street station has a bad name, and not just because of the occasion after the 2003 FA Vase final at Villa Park when a lady of ill repute and yet more doubtful taste tried to proposition a well-known and strangely flustered Northern League official over a cheese and pickle sandwich.

Readers of Country Life magazine voted it Britain’s second ugliest building – though what’s particularly rural about New Street station is uncertain – whilst a nationwide customer satisfaction survey supposed it to be joint bottom alongside Liverpool Lime Street and the egregious East Croydon.

Marking his 80th birthday, Dr David Jenkins – the former Bishop of Durham – had observed to one or other of these columns that his two resolutions upon entering his ninth decade were never again to drive a car more than miles and never again to change trains at Birmingham.

Since then they’ve spent £550m on its renaissance, completed in 2014, though whether it has become any more beautiful is no doubt in the eye of the beholder.

A greater scandal may be the price of train tickets from North-East England. Booked online, in advance and with a senior rail card, a return from Darlington to Coleshill is just under £60. From London, also via Birmingham, but without a rail card, it’s £15.

Originally the game had been scheduled for the previous Saturday. Gary Brand, a London traveller, asked about a refund, was told the admin charge would be £10 each way, forked out another £15 for a second ticket and had still paid just half what we had.

Without mishap, we change for Coleshill Parkway. Like rail replacement bus, “Parkway” is one of those terms which strikes fear into the hearts of seasoned travellers. Translated, it usually means “a station which is an awfully long way from the town.”

Mansfield or Bristol may be the record-holders but, as ever, the column is open to suggestions.

Coleshill Parkway’s just a 25-minute stroll from the quiet town with its pillory and whipping post, said to have been the penitent stool for drunkards and for bakers who sold underweight loaves, whether or not under the influence.

In the Green Man, one of the surviving pubs, there’s a chap from Coleshill whose dad worked at Dunston power station. What did he do, we ask? “Next to nothing,” says his son and points us finally towards the ground.

THE Midland League is that of Sporting Khalsa, Coventry Sphinx and Boldmere St Michael’s. Coleshill were once known as The Rabbits, not because of perceived anxiousness, but because of the excellence of the half-time rabbit pie.

Team manager Paul Casey is wary, nonetheless. “To get to Wembley you have to beat a team from the Northern League, which has had the best players and the best teams at this level since time began,” he writes in the programme.

It’s a lovely winter day, though two of the Colemen, as more prosaically now they are known, wear woolly gloves. It’s attire regarded with a certain circumspection – shall we say – by the visiting supporters.

Among the travellers is Peterlee lad Lee Stewart, who last season watched exactly 300 games (as we have hitherto observed), but who also collects Eddie Stobart lorries, Wetherspoons pubs – “ticked one at Ashby-de-la-Zouch on the way down” – and, most improbably of all, Edward VIII pillar boxes.

Around 100 are thought still to stand, one of them in Coleshill. It’s Lee’s third. “Catterick, Bridlington and now this.”

There, too, is Dunston stalwart and former Stanley United player Frank Rankin, who talks of the “amateur” days recalled on the page opposite. “We didn’t do bad,” says Frank. “Thirty bob in our hands on the Saturday and a £2 postal order on the Tuesday morning.”

Dunston lead after nine minutes, hang on until the 83rd, take the game into extra-time, when extraordinary things start to happen.

Within 15 minutes, three players are sent off, all from the home side and all for tackles ranging from rash through reckless to downright blood curdling.

Numerically dominant, Dunston win 3-1 and will play Ashford, not Newport, joined in the last 16 by at least two other Ebac Northern League clubs. Though we head home in a blizzard, the Railroad to Wembley is clearing once again.