THE SHILDON CONNECTION

Day 8           Monday, 15 September 2014
 

In which we visit a railway museum and eat a dismal lunch

On day seven we drove back to Wallsend-on-Tyne to see family.  The submarine engine warning light on the dashboard went out just as mysteriously as it went on and, to date, it has stayed off.  On day eight, we drove to Shildon, to the ‘Locomotion’ railway museum.  It was free to park and free to enter.  Most of the exhibits were provided by the railway museum in York, so I’d seen them before.  They were none the less impressive for all that.  It was a pleasant experience wandering around and taking photographs of the exhibits. I killed an hour or so in profitable fashion. My wife was far more interested in the Royal carriages and the wagons-lit than the locomotives themselves.  It’s funny, but she doesn’t seem to get the same pleasure from clack and snifting valves, Giesl ejectors, Franco-Crosti boilers and Walschaerts valve gear as I do.
I walked round the back of the museum.  The public weren’t supposed to go there, but I wanted to take a photograph of the first railway bridge in the world, built in 1825 for the Stockton and Darlington Railway.  Shildon once employed 2,400 people in its wagon works, but the works were closed in 1984. The museum was on the site of the works.
Standing in the yard, forlorn and in poor condition, was 65033, the last North-Eastern Railway J21 0-6-0 locomotive.  I had seen her in steam at Beamish many years ago. Part of her cab roof was missing and her BR number had been stencilled on her cabside in an amateurish and unbecoming fashion.  She had been a handsome machine with an elegant chimney and had been one of the unsung workhorses of pick-up freight and coal haulage duties, as well as shunting the north-eastern goods yards for close to eighty years.
We drove to Crook.  My wife hated it. “No-one would want to come here,” she moaned.  It wasn’t exactly Bath or Chipping Norton, but I thought it had a bit of character.  The shops and flats above were mean, but there were open green spaces.  We chose such a space to sit where we could observe the town traffic, the war memorial and the parish church.  I ate a cold Gregg’s sausage roll and a tepid steak bake, both of which tasted vile.  We walked along to Glendale Park, an untidy few hectares of grass but with tennis courts that were far better than Haddington’s.  I threw a tennis ball for the dog.
We drove on to Tow Law, with its head in the very clouds.  You couldn’t see much because the streets were swathed in mist, but it looked an ordinary sort of town.  We didn’t stay. 
Back in Barnard Castle, I picked up a pristine volume called: “British Railways Past and Present: North Yorkshire” from the second-hand bookshop on Marketgate.  I chatted to the elderly lady who ran the shop.  Much of her business had leached away. “Mainly Amazon, e-bay and the charity shops, I’m afraid,” she said.  “We’ve been here 27 years, my husband and I.  We were originally from the Midlands – Tipton – the ‘Black Country.’  This is my home now. If we didn’t have some independent income, we couldn’t keep this place going.”  A friend who owned a second-hand bookshop told me once that it was the most glorious way to lose money that he could think of.
I waited outside the supermarket for my wife.  There was a hardware shop at the back of the car park, and it was selling plants off cheaply, mainly because they were dead.  However, there were two less terminally ill specimens, so I bought them.  They were both alpine perennials the names of which I didn’t recognise.  I thought I would take them home to die rather than let them die here.
I finished reading Somerset Maugham’s ‘Ashenden’ spy short stories.  It was excellent, but somewhere, some time ago, I’ve read it before.   I also ploughed on with Tomas the Swede’s bicycle tour of just about everywhere in Europe.  He’s on day 120.  At 50 euros a day for his board and lodging, say, it must have cost him well over £3,000.  His tale of woe continues – too many hills, too much rain, poor food, dreadful roads, awful Frenchmen, broken spokes, mashed gears.  To paraphrase Robert Louis Stevenson, he travels hopelessly, then arrives.