BY booking in advance, leaving before 8am, with a senior railcard and when no one’s looking, you can get a single from Darlington to Leicester for just £13. It’s a bit early, but times are tight.

So the Railroad to Wembley continues, Barwell v Norton and Stockton Ancients, FA Vase quarterfinal.

It was with Norton, at Eccleshill back on September 5, that the felicitous odyssey had begun.

“Like holy matrimony,” we began, “the railroad to Wembley should not be enterprised nor taken in hand unadvisedly, lightly or wantonly.” The sun shone; that’s how long ago it was.

They won 8-0, crowd 25, opposition enfeebled.

Barwell would be a different proposition entirely.

They top the Midland Alliance, the league of Coventry Sphinx, Boldmere St Michael’s and Friar Lane and Epworth. In 26 games they’ve won 23, drawn the remainder and conceded just eight goals.

Norton had let in seven in the previous match.

The train halts just before Derby. They’re waiting for a platform, says the guard.

She doesn’t say that the platform appears to be coming on a flatbed truck from Swindon, or somewhere.

We stand there – like one o’clock half struck as my old Aunty Betty used inexplicably to observe – for 40 minutes. At Derby we wait another 15, The guard blames congestion.

They say Vick’s Vapour Rub’s good for that. Thank goodness for an early start.

Barwell’s 12 miles southwest of Leicester. The bus, happily, is more punctual, and the fare just £2.50.

THE name translates as the stream where the boar drank, its history dating back to when Lady Godiva – not to be confused with Lady Gaga – galloped round those parts.

Barwell’s greatest claim to fame, however, is that at about 4pm on Christmas Eve 1965 the biggest meteorite ever to land upon these shores came crashing to earth in the village.

Some, it’s said, had assumed it to be a bright star in the east. Others envisaged Armageddon. Sir John Betjeman, it may be recalled, wished much the same for Slough.

“When it first entered the atmosphere it would have been about the size of a desk,” said a gentleman from the National Space Centre. “Most of that had been burned up on the way.”

Officially it was an L6 ordinary chondrite, 4.5bn years old. What fragments remained were reckoned together to be about the size of a Christmas turkey, though none explained how many it might feed.

Whilst a bit of a downer for Barwell, it proved a stocking filler for meteorite hunters throughout the world. Even Patrick Moore pitched up, found a bit of rock and took it to the local museum.

“They told me they had plenty and that I could keep it so long as I left them it in my will,” he recalled.

The British Museum, evermagnanimous, offered 7/6d an ounce. One chap, having kept a sizable chunk on top of his piano for a week, got £39 10s from Leicester Museum and thus was able to afford a good holiday. It was 1965, remember.

Rock of ages, a bit of asteroid also wrecked someone’s car engine.

The insurance company said it was an act of God, so the owner went to a priest. “See the insurance company,”

said the reverend gentleman.

Though scientists had seen it coming, they’d supposed the odds of the meteorite landing on Britain to be around 300-1.

Norton’s chances of putting one over on Barwell appeared to be pretty much the same.

IT’S an unprepossessing village of around 7,000 people, formerly one of the many feet-first places thereabouts that made shoes and hosiery. Whatever else may be said of Barwell, it seems not to be agog.

A couple of misspelled match posters, apparently written by a six-year-old, peer timidly round the corner of shop windows. A chap in the Queens Head, Barwell’s oldest building apart from the 13th century church, is debating whether to watch the match or clean out the pump in his fish pond.

The temperature’s low at the Leicester Mercury, too, not so much as a paragraph in the Saturday evening edition.

After a couple of pints of Marston’s ever-excellent bitter, we head for the ground. The other chap decides to clean out the pump in his fish pond.

It’s a nice set-up, the newish cantilever stand opened by former Liverpool and England goalkeeper Chris Kirkland, who grew up in Barwell.

Around 600 are in, among them the sedulous Sixer who the previous evening had watched Barton-on-Humber and who seems intent not just on seeing a game at every ground in England, but doing them in alphabetical order.

The PA’s playing Robbie Williams. Mr Williams is not believed to have a Barwell connection.

NORTON were promoted to the skilltrainingltd Northern League first division this season after 30 years of trying, presently kick around lower mid-table and have been hit by the news that speed merchant Sonny Andrews is still injured.

Jamie Clarke, an L6 ordinary chondrite among Northern League centre forwards – getting on 1,000 games, 700 goals – is up front with Michael Dunwell.

For much of the first half, the ball seems several light years away.

Barwell press incessantly, Norton’s defence heroically hurling themselves in danger’s path. In truth it’s not a very good game; the chap with the pond pump may have a point.

At half-time it’s somehow goalless, the Ancients relying on a Northern League philosophy so old it’s almost Rosicrucian.

They’re kicking down in the second half.

Optimism burns out faster than an earthbound meteorite: Norton goalkeeper James Briggs, impressive in the first half, brings down home forward Kevin Charley. Charley, proper, scores from the spot.

Norton enjoy a brief response. Hillerby shoots narrowly over, Dunwell heads wide, Clarke brings a good safe from the keeper and sportingly pats him on the head. The goalie’s called Liam Castle, and he’s impregnable.

Barwell score twice more in the last five minutes. “We are invincible,” chant the home supporters. There are offers of a lift home, even get-thee-behind-me-Satan offers of a lift with a stop at the Wetherby fish shop, but there are times when you need to be alone.

In the two-leg semi-final, they play Whitley Bay, the holders. That’ll be another matter. As probably they said after the events of Christmas Eve 1965, the good folk of Barwell won’t know what’s hit them.

THERE’S also a little PS, speaking of Whitley Bay, to last week’s report on the Seahorses’ 5-1 quarter-final win at Shildon.

The Dean Street crowd topped 1,500, Among those who’d not seen Shildon for several years – so long ago that the team played in traditional red – was John Forster and a group of friends from Darlington.

Shildon now play in blue.

So do Whitley Bay, which was why their fans wore blue and white scarves, though their team was in yellow. It was all a bit much for the occasionals who not only assumed Shildon to be in yellow but went to the pub celebrating a famous victory.

“What are you talking about,” someone said. “The score’s just been on telly. You lost 5-1.”

John, a Darlington policeman, told the tale to the Legends radio show.

They sent him a ball, sponsored by Specsavers.

“It’s a bit embarrassing,” he says.

And finally...

THE team which for 80 years played down Cold Blow Lane (Backtrack, March 6) was Millwall.

Jim Jennings in Durham, who thought that one easy, today invites readers to suggest why, in his Liverpool days, John Barnes was known as Digger.

Still digging, the column returns on Saturday.