Donation from afar

I heard an interesting bit of news today. The appeal for the replica 'Stainmore Summit' sign is going well and we are on target to have raised sufficient funds to erect the sign during August.

But Mike tells me that one of the cheques that arrived today particularly delighted them both It arrived on their door mat all the way from New Zealand.

The contributor was Charlie Oxley, a former shedmaster at Kirkby Stephen who will be known to many of the ex-employees who read this blog and who will be around at Kirkby Stephen East on 29th August. Charlie is now 83 years old and lives in Taranaki which if I remember right is on the east side of North Island somewhere north of Wellington.

Charlie was shedmaster at Kirkby Stephen shed from 1956 to 1957.

Amazing to think that half a century later and half way around the world the old line should still remain so vividly in some one's memory. But it doesn't surprise me at all. Charlie says that he is beyond making the trip back to the UK now to attend the reunion in August but he is delighted that the sign is going back up at the summit again.

'70007'

Few things are certain in life but I guess one of them is probably that BR 'Britannia' Class 70007 'Coeur-de-Lion' never hauled a 'Blackpool Special' over Stainmore. It isn't beyond the bounds of theoretical  possibility that one of the Class might have found itself running into 'Barney' station on a troop 'special' from Darlington or even possibly 'around the block' from West Auckland on a 'running in' turn after attention at Darlington Works. But such large and heavy engines were absolutely verboten over the wrought iron viaducts of the Stainmore Line.

To be honest I'm not even sure where 70007's 'native turf' was. I am no expert on 'Britannias' and my only reference book is on a bookshelf 7,000 miles away. But I think she was an Eastern Region engine. Can any of our readers tell us?

Anyway the reason I am posting today's image is that it is one of the beautiful paintings by John Robinson that we are currently stocking in the shop at Kirkby Stephen East. I just love the late 1950's atmosphere of this work and the portraits of the footplate staff.

But if you want a copy, don't delay. There are only a limited number of this picture available in our stock , and we are expecting it to be popular. Drop in at the station soon!

D3 at Kirkby Stephen

Here is a neat picture I came across in a collection Mark let me have recently - a Great Northern Railway 'Ivatt' D3 4-4-0. The picture was taken by H.C. Casserley, I think on the coaling track at Kirkby Stephen shed. It must be between 1933 and 1935 which was when '4349' was based at Kirkby Stephen.

The D3's cam north in 1931 and were originally based at Darlington for trains to 'Barney', Saltburn and Bishop Auckland. But two years later they found their way 'over the top' and they were not popular. Not only were they designed for the flat lands of Lincolnshire and Cambridgeshire but they had spartan cabs too. As you can see complaints by footplate crews led to the fitting of a cab extension with a single window but they certainly weren't as 'roomy' as Worsdell cabs. Those 6'8" 'drivers' were probably dodgy on greasy rails too. Pretty little engines though.

Anyway they were gone by 1935. As luck would have it when they closed the Redhills direct link between the Eden Valley and Cockermouth lines the engines were too big for the turntable at Penrith.

If you look just above the front buffer you can see a railwayman working on his allotment on the embankment side.

One way of watering a locomotive

This made me smile up at Kirkby Stephen East today. The Peckett 0-4-0 Saddle Tank 'F.C. Tingey' is now almost completely reassembled and due to be steamed soon and the time had come to fill her up with water for the first time this year.

Unfortunately we are lacking a water column at the Heritage Centre. There hasn't been one for fifty years and I'm not sure where we would find one these days, let alone any ample water supply to run through it.

The only answer is a garden hose. Mike attaches it to the sink in the 'Gents' and runs it across the platform. As the locomotive is being filled from scratch it has to be filled through the boiler inspection hatch rather than the tank. When the engine is in steam and running of course the injector will be used to carry water from the tank into the boiler.

I never thought that I would see some B&Q plastic hose being used for this job. It takes all day to fill to half way up the glass, but it works.

New picture stock arrives

The railway artist John Robinson called around at our house yesterday to drop off a stock of reproductions for the shop at Kirkby Stephen East. His painting "Those were the Days ... Heading For Stainmore" has been one of the most popular items in the shop and we sold the last copy in our stock three weeks ago. Now, thanks to John's generosity we have a good stock available for the summer. But if you want a copy better to drop in sooner rather than later as the are likely to sell quickly again. When they are gone, they are gone!

In with this stock that we have there are also examples of other work by John, including his popular painting of footplate staff with 70007, 41350 with a passenger train at Holmfirth and J21 65089 ion the Weardale branch with a passenger train, but just a few copies of each.

Why not drop into the shop and take a look at them soon? We are open Saturdays and Sundays from 10:00 AM to 4:00 PM throughout the summer.

Old drain new flood.

I had to go up to Kirkby Stephen East this afternoon to pick up some things but as I was putting my shoes on around three the heavens opened. We had the biggest deluge that I've seen anywhere in England for a long time (although to be honest it was tame stuff compared with some of the autumn monsoons we get in Japan). It fairly stair-rodded it down here for two hours and going up to the Station seemed a bad, bad idea, especially with the old place so churned up by diggers over the last couple of weeks.

Anyway in the end it did stop raining and I drove up through the floods on Nateby Road. When I got there it wasn't as bad as I'd feared - there were some small ponds formed near the Tebay Platform extension but not the lake I had anticipated.

The reason soon became apparent. A while back I mentioned that we had discovered the old cast iron water column feed pipe hereabouts, but today's heavy rain had also revealed the location of the iron cover of the old drain that the South Durham and Lancashire Union Railway had installed to drain away overflow from the water column. Amazingly after 150 years that drain is still working! It was very successfully coping with this afternoon's deluge.

Classic Car Rally looms ...

I had some details yesterday from Phil Thompson about this year's Classic Car Rally. If it isn't in your diary yet it is going to be held at Kirkby Stephen East the Sunday after next - The 3rd of July. Admission is £2. Don't miss it!

Scanning down the list it looks as if Phil has had quite a lot of entries this year - so far 28 confirmed in total. There are four classes - 'pre-1930', '1930 to 1960', '1960 to 1990' and 'after 1990'. He calculates that there is space in the main car park for 40 cars so we should be OK BUT if you are one of the people who expressed interest but haven't got back to him so far to confirm PLEASE let him know this week to make sure we have sufficient space.

Years ago my dream used to be to own a Citroen DS14 - I loved those 'Maigret' programmes where the Paris cops use to hang onto the running boards shouting "That way patron!". But I'm afraid the only vaguely 'classic car' I ever owned was a pea green 15 year old clapped out Vauxhall HA series that had long been used by the driving instructor up in Kirkwall in the Orkney Islands. It cost me £40 and it wasn't a good buy.

Read all about it!

On the North Eastern Railway many local station masters had the valuable 'perk' of acting as the local coal agent, ordering household fuel in by the wagon load and selling it on to local merchants. This was a practice that began in the earliest Stockton and Darlington Railway days. So I guess they were amongst the first of the modern 'franchisees'

But someone in the KSE shop yesterday reminded me of another perk that often came the stationmaster's way - to act as the local W.H.Smith wholesaler for newspapers and magazines. The person concerned had begun his railway career as a 'porter lad' at Castle Eden station and a part of his job had been to cycle around the area every day delivering the papers off the train. For this he received two shillings a week (10p).

I wonder if similar arrangements applied at any of the Stainmore line stations? I seem to recollect that the papers were dumped off the 7:14 AM from Darlington at Bowes by the guard every morning into the shelter on the down platform but it is only a hazy memory. Can anyone remember papers being dropped off at any other stations along the line or porters delivering them door to door?

Platform lamp-posts installed

Another chilly day at Kirkby Stephen East - whenever is this summer ever going to arrive? Today the volunteers installed the three cast iron lamp posts on the new platform extension, fitted the cable tubes and cemented them into place.

Whenever I did any work of this kind in my old garden in Lancashire I had a neighbour who just loved to come across and tell me that he 'couldn't help but notice' that whatever I had just cemented into the ground was not quite vertical. No risk of that with the KSE team. Everything was double checked for squareness and adjusted for height, lines and 'levels' were everywhere.

The heads of these lamps aren't fitted yet - they will need to await the wiring of the outdoor circuit. But I can't wait to see what they look like lit up on a warm summer evening when the trainshed doors are open and a locomotive is in steam with a couple of Gresley teak coaches in tow. That day is surely coming.

Mystery Photo?

I came across this interesting picture in a collection that I was given last week, and I wonder how many Stainmore line aficionados know where it is? I think that this is the only photo that I have ever seen of the location. Ivatt 4MT 43102 is working hard up the bank even with such a light load and that should offer a clue. But actually now almost everything in this photograph has vanished.

The road along the hillside in the background is the real clue. These are the 'summit cottages' - a row of (I think) four terraced houses a few hundred yards west of the summit box and close to where the road to Barras used to leave the old A66. Often in photographs of the summit box you can see that group of trees behind the accommodation bridge in the background. The cottages went a couple of years before the end of the line, maybe in 1959.

I can only remember the cottages when they were derelict. Signalmen going on duty would park up in the cinder lane in front of the houses and climb over the fence just behind the locomotive here and walk up the line to the right to get to work. Once slithering down that lane in winter we went nose first into a couple of feet of snow in his 'mini' HEC159 going on 'early turn' but my grandfather always kept a shovel in the car to deal with that kind of thing.

Now the summit cottage site is under the westbound carriageway of the A66.

Tees Valley Viaduct

When I was a youngster I used to haunt 'Barney' Woods and I today I love to walk up the left bank to Cotherstone when I have the opportunity. You can still find the two abutments of the Tees Viaduct about a half mile upstream from the castle. But sadly this beautiful view, which I came across this week in a collection of photographs forwarded to me by Mark Keefe, has long since vanished.

Back in the 1950's any walk up the Tees on a sunny summer evening would be punctuated at some stage by the sound of locomotive whistles and that distinctive rumble of a loose-coupled train of hoppers clattering over the high girders.  Depending on where you were you might just catch a glance of the train high above the trees. The viaduct was an exquisite piece of engineering, built on a 'skew' at an angle of about 30 degrees to the banks. Those ashlar sandstone pillars were amazing pieces of complex masonry, the kind of craftsmanship that these days can only be seen in the work of the specialists who look after the fabric of medieval cathedrals.

And there was something quite special about this location too - the Tees flowing deep and fast under the forest. Always a rather sinister river to me, that dark peat stained water. As kids we were ever warned about the danger of 'rolls' after heavy rain.

But you can still get some feel of the grandeur of Tees Valley Viaduct because the abutments are still there in the woods if you go and take a look. Well worth the trip!

On the record.

I was in the Links Centre at Kirkby Stephen this morning to meet up with Carole Lloyd. Two former employees from the Locomotive Department at Kirkby Stephen East, Ivan Dobson and Colin Walker, came in to let Carole record their reminiscences of working on the line, and I was also able to sit in on the conversation.

It was a very interesting session and I really enjoyed listening to their yarns, some of which involved old workmates of theirs that I knew myself as a youngster fifty years ago. I was keen to see how Carole organised a meet-up like this - we are very good the the UK at the techniques of recording oral histories.

Fun too. Once everyone had relaxed we forgot all about the camera and microphone and just chatted away about old times. I hadn't realised that Ivan was on the footplate of the Q6 63355 in the famous incident when it derailed at Smardale in May 1955. A real piece of Stainmore history!

If you have any memories of the line, either as an employee or a passenger or in any other way, and you would like to put them on record, please get in touch with us. You can click on my e-mail link here and I will forward your message, or drop in at Kirkby Stephen East any weekend and we will put you in touch with Carole. It is completely painless, in fact very enjoyable, and your memories will have been shared with future researchers.

A ticket for Penrith.

Even in the 1950's many of the buildings along the Stainmore Line lacked any electricity supply. Bowes station was one example - I'm not sure if the domestic side of the property was ever wired up but there was certainly none in the booking office.

My grandfather told me that some time in the late 1950's he was on duty covering early turn as 'signalman-porter ' at Bowes one cold and wet winter morning.  It was still pitch dark, half an hour before dawn. The first train of the day was the 7:14 AM DMU from Darlington to Penrith and it was already 'on line' from Tees Valley Junction when he noticed a passenger on the platform. With the exception of the local track walker hardly anyone ever caught this train, and certainly in the middle of winter.

He took a paraffin lamp down from the signal box and hurried to unlock the booking office and groped around in the dark for a day return to Penrith which was what the passenger wanted to buy. Then he had to rush back to the signal box to offer the train 'on line' to Stainmore.

Just over an hour later as he was eating his breakfast 'bait' by the signal box stove and enjoying a pint tin mug of strong tea (made as always with condensed milk I guess) he received a call relayed across the telephone circuits from the ticket inspector on the barrier at Penrith. Might be have issued a dog ticket to the young man who had boarded the 7:14 AM train? Yes, groping around in the dark with only a flickering oil lamp to illuminate the scene he had found the Penrith tickets OK but not noticed the words 'Dog Ticket' there across the face of the ticket in the dim light. I guess it wasn't the first time it was done.

Lynn Hopwood Collection

During the ‘Stainmore 150’ celebrations between 27-29 August there will be a selection of Victorian costumes from the Lynn Hopwood Costume Collection on display at Kirkby Stephen East. We are hoping that some of them can be displayed in the NER clerestory coach which will be stationed in the 'Darlington Platform' behind Fletcher No.910.

Lynn has a vast collection of authentic period costumes dating from 1800 together with an array of accessories from underwear to shoes and jewellery. The variety includes 97 wedding gowns from 1869 to 2002. Over the years the collection has become so popular that she spends much of her time giving talks, doing fashion shows and displays throughout the country.

Lynn and her partner now live in Kirkby Stephen and have a shop in Market Street called K.L .Vintage where they sell costumes from Victorian to 1980’s, accessories, bric a brac and small antique furniture.

"The 'J25' out in the Fog"

A couple of days ago I asked here one '150 Diary' if anyone had come across any 'ghost stories' relating to the Stainmore line. And now maybe we have our first haunting. Mike Thompson has passed on to me a file of material written by Vernon Pearson that he received earlier this year.

There is some interesting stuff in there and I won't fully disclose the full story here of this 'happening' because we will probably be publishing it soon in a new 'Stainmore Miscellany'. But here is the bare bones of what Vernon wrote.

He was coming off early turn at Stainmore one very foggy winter Friday and went down from the box and into the lamp room to prepare some signal lamps. While he was working there he heard the shrill whistle of a 'J25' which surprised him because when he had signed off a couple of minutes before no trains were 'on line'. He went outside to check but there was no train approaching he thought that he must have just imagined it.

Later he went back up into the cabin and jokingly told the three people there that he'd been 'hearing things'. But they told him that they too thought that they had heard an engine out in the dense fog, somewhere just near the 'up' home signal.

That use to be pretty well where the westbound carriageway of the A66 now comes to where the old road to Barras once branched off to the left.

Spooky eh? "The 'J25' out in the Fog." Any more stories of the inexplicable out there?

Platform follow-up

When I was up at Kirkby Stephen East this morning (see the 'blog' below) I put up a picture of work in progress and commented that things were moving so quickly now that it might be worth publishing an 'after' picture tomorrow so that you could see for yourselves.

No need to wait. Mike has just sent me some 'before' and 'after' shots covering progress today.

Here is how things were at the beginning of the day as the void between the platform extension walls was back filled.

and here's how things looked by 'knocking off' time after around 130 concrete sleeper beams had been laid. Impressive progress eh?

More platform news

There is another 'big push' in progress this weekend getting the new platform extension into shape. After the work on Wednesday the retaining walls for what will be the new 'West Bay' are now partly in place and at least you can get the feel of the full width of the platform area.

Here is a picture of the 'gang' at work around ten this morning. Just to give you some feel of the pace of work I will publish a photograph of progress at close of play tomorrow afternoon.

If you would like to help with this work as a volunteer please drop in at Kirkby Stephen East and you will be very welcome.

Uniforms

At our meeting of the '150' steering group last night we were talking about the possibilities for wearing uniforms at the '150 weekend' in August. Our plan has been for platform staff to wear 'period' railway costumes and we had thought that it would be possible to rent them from a theatrical agency but it seems not. I think that if you wanted anything as specialised as a 'Stockton and Darlington' or a North Eastern Railway uniform you would probably have to research it yourself and learn to sew.

Even a good old British Rail uniform might be quite hard to track down these days. I can remember when there was a 'surplus store' in a warehouse around the back of Euston where you could buy such stuff for a fiver but I'm afraid that it probably all sold out long ago.

I don't know what we'll do for the August weekend, it needs some thought. For anyone dealing with the public on those days maybe just matching blazers and flannels might work. After ten years of living in Japan where train staff not only always wear uniforms but wouldn't dream of being at work in the cab without their cap on and wearing a pair of white cotton gloves to keep their hands clean and the machinery shining it seems very strange to me these days to see anyone in charge of a railway with out some kind of a uniform on.

Ghost stories?

One thing that has been going through my overly-fertile mind recently is that I have never - ever - heard any 'ghost stories' about the Stainmore line, although you could hardly imagine a railway anywhere more suited to host to the occasional blood-chilling tale. Railways the world over are routinely supposed to be haunted and in Britain we even have a substantial book on the topic - 'Railway Ghosts and Phantoms' by W.B. Herbert - billed on the dust jacket as '100 track rattling yarns'. It contains details of the famous 'Ghost of North Road Station'  from the nineteenth century and also a story from the Darlington area - 'The Man in the Black Beret' which describes and encounter at an unidentified spot in the 1960's which could have been on the closed Darlington to 'Barney' line.

There are two lengths of line that I always felt might make a good spot for haunting. one is the stretch just east of the summit as the line winds down into a hidden stretch of the upper Greta Valley at the County Boundary. This was always 'frontier country' right back into the days when it was the Marches between Northumbria and Strathclyde and there must have been endless dastardly deeds done around this spot. The other is Big Hill Cut, a place that sends shivers up my spine on silent dark foggy afternoons and where I wouldn't want to camp for the night.

But maybe we do have some ghost stories of our own. Has anyone ever heard of one?

An all-male cast.,

Mark Keefe brought a box of books into the shop the other day that I need to try and place with an antiquarian bookseller to raise money for SRC funds. Most of the stock seems to have belonged to a former member of the North Eastern Railway Association. There is some very interesting stuff in there including a bound volume of the 'LNER Magazine' from the 1930's.

Browsing through some original bound copies of the British Transport Commission minutes from the 1950's the listings of Commission members and officers attending board meetings caught my eye. There were around thirty individuals attending the fortnightly sessions and - well, no surprise here I suppose! - not a single woman in evidence anywhere. When it came to managing the nations publicly owned transportation system women might just as well have not existed in those distant times.

I found myself trying to remember if I could think of a single female member of staff along the Stainmore line anywhere back then. There were a few kind stationmaster's wives of course, and I am sure that in common with the rest of Britain during both World Wars there may have been female cleaners at Kirkby Stephen shed and a few female signalmen and porters. Does anyone know who they were? If we don't record there names now it will be history lost forever.

The only female staff that I can recall in the 1950's were the (two or three?) ladies that used to work in the refreshment room at the east end of Barnard Castle station building. I think that that there may also have been a lady who worked as a book-keeper or clerk  in the big office at Barney station too. 'Women's Work' they would have said back then in that utterly different world.

Apart from that I fear that it was an 'all-male cast', a bit like the theatre in Shakespeare's day eh?

More about William Hogg

To take a break from more serious work that I OUGHT to have done last night I squandered an hour on my 'Family Tree' web site trying to patch together  more detail about William our first stationmaster at Kirkby Stephen East. He worked here from 1861 through into the 1890's after which he vanishes from the local record . He must be one of the several 'William Hoggs' that died elsewhere in the UK during the following decade and a diligent search should turn him up soon.

His father Thomas was born at Gainford in 1782 and his mother, Ellen was born in Great Ayton in 1803. They had at least seven children and William, born in 1834, was the fifth.

But here is the interesting thing. Thomas must have been married before, he had a son Joseph born in 1818. And in the 1851 Census William Hogg was working as a porter working for the Stockton and Darlington Railway, employed at Redcar station where his older half-brother was  stationmaster. So it was family connections that eventually brought him to the top Kirkby Stephen job. Later, when he was 23 he was working as a guard on the newly built Darlington and Barnard Castle line and there, somehow he met his wife Sarah Annie and their marriage was registered between April and June 1857.

So there are some bare bones of a biography. Often you can get no more. But at Kirkby Stephen East, thanks to 'Poet' John Close, we at least know what kind of a man he was and what he looked like later in life.

Belah and Stainmore Trip

If you have looked on the '150' web site in the last couple of days you will see that I have added a page on the trip that will be available to visit Stainmore and Belah. You will find it here.

On Saturday 27th August - (the 'Grand Re-Opening Day' when we will reintroduce passenger train services at Kirkby Stephen East) - Mark Keefe has organised two coaches to take visitors to the unveiling of the new 'Stainmore Summit' sign (assuming that we have raised the cash!) by Steve Davies MBE. The coaches will also to visit the old signal box at the south end of Belah Viaduct. There is no charge for these coach places.

But part of this trip crosses private property and we have to limit capacity to just the two official coaches. So it is likely that there will be more demand for the available places than we can satisfy.

The organisers feel that the only fair way to deal with his is to hold a lottery for the available places. To enter this all you need to do is to follow the link to the new web page and log your name and contact details on the form available there. If you are lucky when we draw the numbers you will be allocated a place but we will be asking for a deposit from winners to hold the place open. This is refundable before you board the coach on the 27th August.

The important thing is that if you want to make this trip we must have a form back from you by Sunday 10th July. So if you want to attend please don't delay - why not fill it in now? Here it is.

Model line-up

Well, there's the Model Railway Show over for another year. Although temperatures plunged today after the baking hot afternoon we enjoyed yesterday at least the rain held off. The event turned out to be a lot of fun, occupying the whole of the 'Darlington Platform' and two of the rooms in the central range of the building. Those of us on duty amongst the volunteers were kept busy all day in the buffet car and shop as the construction team kept up a cracking pace outside on the new platform work.

I always really enjoy a good 'local' model railway show, a real British institution. While large club layouts often dominate the big national exhibitions it is at the smaller shows that you often see some real ingenuity and imagination in the development and design of smaller portable layouts. There were some great trader's stalls there today too.

Kirkby Stephen East is ideal for putting on this kind of event because in is just such an interesting and friendly venue. It makes me wonder what other 'happenings' might work well in this setting. Talking to Mike this afternoon we were reflecting that by the time we run the third Model Railway Show next year we are likely to have steam trains operating on site and that should be a real crowd-puller.

Model Show Tomorrow

Coming over to Kirkby Stephen East for the Model Railway Show tomorrow? I was up at the Heritage Centre for a few hours this afternoon and before the crew arrived to start setting up for the event I took the opportunity to sweep the platform - somehow it has got very dusty during the last few weeks with all the work outside the west end.

Just before four exhibitors started to arrive and as you can see there was soon a line of layouts spread along the Darlington Platform and in some of the adjacent rooms. By the time I came away there was already quite a mixture of 'N' and '00' gauge layouts in evidence.

Portable layouts always fascinate me, all that effort in construction to make sure that they fit together seamlessly. But at the same time they have to be robust to cope with all the transportation involved and the changes in temperature.

Hope we will see you at Kirkby Stephen East some time tomorrow! The weather looks set to be fine and I think we will have quite a crowd over the weekend. Admission is £2, with children under 14 at £1. Some good stuff in the shop too.

Ask a question ...

Ask a question, get an answer. That is usually the way of it on this '150 Diary'. And today David Rayner has reminded me that the answer to my question about locomotive water supply is already answered in Keith Richardson's excellent book on the history of Kirkby Stephen East.

You might remember that yesterday I commented that I'd noticed an old cast iron pipe revealed in the trench being dug for the new Tebay Platform facings and I speculated that it must be the old feed for the Stockton & Darlington water column. That is it at the head of this 'blog'. Well, checking old photographs today it must indeed be the locomotive water feed - if you look at the photograph below you can see that this pipe was heading directly for that water column next to the tender of the locomotive (although I think this 'ironmongery' was a replacement column of NER vintage).

But David reminded me that the North Eastern Railway (nor the LNER nor BR after) never trusted the new-fangled electricity supply for anything as essential as locomotive water supply. In Keith's book it records that right up until the end of steam they relied on a pump driven by a small stationery steam engine in the locomotive shed to lift water out of the River Eden. Presumably that was the same pump that had been used ever since Stockton and Darlington days. I wonder if it went for scrap in 1960, or was rescued by someone?

It doesn't surprise me. The railway never trusted new-fangled technologies. At Barney West and many other signal boxes for example they had gas lighting right up until closure although for the price of 50 metres of cable they could have run electric over from the station.

Or could they? That is an interesting question. Did 'Barney' station actually have electricity installed? Can anyone remember?

More on the 'Tebay Platform'

Up at Kirkby Stephen East for a while this afternoon and the amount of progress since the weekend was just amazing. This is a very exciting time to be a volunteer on site and if you are tempted I suggest that you get down and get your overalls on quick! This will be a time that one day will live in legend in the story of the rebuilding of the Stainmore Railway.

The widening of the running line extension to the 'Darlington Platform' is well underway but what really got me excited today was the work being done one the other side of the building on the Tebay Platform. The foundations were being dug to extend the platform facing westwards, and a gang were hard at work rebuilding the stone work of the platform wall.

In British Rail days in the early 1950's the Tebay Platform lost its trainshed roof and later the outer retaining wall from the 1886 rebuilding was lowered and one bay at the east end was demolished. As you can see from the photograph the roof added when the station served as the 'bobbin factory' is low and barely clears the roof of the Gresley coach parked for restoration in our cavernous workshop. But given time, patience and money it is all very restorable. As soon as we have the work on this 'facing' complete we will be connecting up these track panels to the rest of the track on the site.

There hasn't been this much building work in progress at Kirkby Stephen East since the trainsheds were rebuilt more than a century ago. It is iinteresting to see what the digger is turning up here as the concrete foundations go in - today I noticed in the trench a cast iron pipe that must have supplied water to the Stockton & Darlington water column here. I wonder where they got the supply from before the hydro-electric supply  at Stenkrith was available.