NEARLY 10,000 wooden figures, each six inches high, are standing in higgledy-piggledy rows, all facing the same direction, as if waiting on a rush-hour platform for a delayed train.
Freddie Mercury is there. So is Rod Stewart, some vampires, a few ghosts, the Angel of the North, 21 brides, 13 grooms, seven Paddington bears and three Beatles in red, blue and yellow Sergeant Pepper uniforms. Perhaps Ringo has nipped to the toilet.
Lilo and Stitch from Disney is there along with Glinda and Elphaba from Wicked and Jude Bellingham and Harry Kane from the England football team. Oh, and Grandma is there, too, in a smart-but-sensible coat. She’s got a lovely felt hat on her head with something sticking out of it.
“Grandma came to stay three times a year,” says a handwritten luggage label attached to her. “She always came by train, always with a feather in her hat!”
Because each of the 9,250 figures has a railway story to tell.
As part of last year’s 200th anniversary celebrations of the Stockton & Darlington Railway, people were given blank wooden pegs and asked to transform them into a doll that represented a “memory of a journey”.
The tag attached to one of the brides, who is wearing a huge wedding dress, says: “My first train journey was Sunderland to London for a wedding in 1945. A steam train came into the station and it terrified me.”
The number of peg dolls that were returned – from people from 49 countries with Sierra Leone being the most distant – surprised the organisers.
Today, for the first and last time, all 9,250 figures go on display at Hopetown in Darlington in the final bicentenary event.
The exhibition is the railway equivalent of Antony Gormley’s Field, which was a terracotta army of 40,000 hand-sized figurines produced in the early 1990s with big, imploring eyes that seemed to be asking deep, imponderable questions. Like will this train ever come?
Some people just scribbled on their pegs; others must have spent hours dressing, etching, painting, coiffuring theirs.
“I take the train to the International Medieval Congress in Leeds every year, always a highlight of my year,” says a tag on an immaculate old fashioned figure.
“My doll is wearing accurate 12th Century dress to represent this.”
Another doll has a clever line of coloured dots surrounding it, and its label explains: “My memory is getting to Whitby station with my Smartie-filled walking stick that I’d purchased on the seafront. I watched in dismay as the stopper fell out as we were boarding the train and the Smarties tumbling between the platform and the train step – heartbroken!”
Over the last six months, each of the dolls has been photographed front and back and its story digitised so that they will form a permanent record of people’s deepest interactions with railways.
“I was a little girl, two years old,” says one doll. “After visiting grandma, I was taken to the station in Darlington by mum. When we arrived, it was packed with soldiers. On seeing us, they made way for us – mam walked through and I was picked up by a soldier and passed over their heads to the train. I often wonder how many of these young men came home.”
Another doll is dressed in Japanese garb and has an old Kodak photographic slide of an industrial site attached to it.
“Kamaishi – Japanese steel town in crisis,” says its luggage label. “‘Don’t go there,’ said the Japanese host family to the visiting geography teacher. ‘It would be like taking Japanese tourists to Middlesbrough.’
"So, it had to be done. With a typhoon heading south, we took the bullet train north to Tokyo and the on to the fishing port of Kesennuma, where there was no English spoken. Somehow we were directed to a lovely family-run ryokan (inn) where I was given a yukata (a lightweight robe) to wear. Fantastic hospitality, lovely people. They sent me off to Kamaishi with an umbrella to see the derelict steelworks, and the A-level students got a case study.”
Other memorable journeys have less of a story attached to them but instead represent an unforgettable moment in time.
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Freddie Mercury, with a big thick moustache and bright yellow jacket, says: “My journey was to go to London from Darlington to see Queen at the Proms in the Park at Hyde Park with my family. We had a wonderful time.”
The exhibition at Hopetown runs until September 27.
On that day, people will be able to collect their dolls and take them home as a memory of S&DR200. Because some peg dolls have been on display in Stockton and Durham before all finally uniting in Darlington, each one will now have acquired a memory of a journey of its own.
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