One of the enjoyable things about being an editor, even of a tinpot little website, is that you get to hand out work to others. Pete Sixsmith being better placed to report on events in our shared home town, since he lives there and I am currently 1,722.8km away, he was duly dispatched to the town's offshoot of the National Railway Museum. The assignment produced this memorable account ...
Long-standing readers of this site are probably aware that Monsieur Salut hails from Shildon, a small town tucked away in a dimple at the top of a hill, in the south west of County Durham.
It’s a place remarkable for few things: a clutch of semi-famous footballers came from it, a notorious safecracker-turned-industrialist and failed football club chairman made his home there - and it has a branch of the National Railway Museum.
The NRM is York’s finest attraction for those whose interest strays beyond medieval cathedrals (plenty of them elsewhere), narrow streets (every pre-industrial city has at least one) and shops (need I say more). York’s modern prosperity was founded on the railways – with some help from chocolate – and when the NRM was set up as a single entity in the 1970s, the city once dominated by George Hudson, the Railway King, was rightly chosen as its venue.
Shildon was a railway centre long before York. The Stockton and Darlington Railway started outside the town at a hamlet called Brussleton where, in 1825, George Stephenson’s Locomotion No 1 was placed on the rails and began to move at a sedate pace to Shildon, on to Heighington and then to Darlington before arriving at Stockton seven hours later.
The company built their Soho Works on the edge of the then village and invited Mr Timothy Hackworth to become the Works Superintendent, which he duly did. His name lives on in the town in the name of a Primary School, which M Salut and I both attended without great distinction, and a pub that was a favoured watering hole of mine for many years.
The railways continued to give employment to Shildon people for over 150 years. The locomotive works became the North Eastern Railway wagon works and went into public ownership under the glorious Attlee government of 1945-51.
For the next 35 years, Shildon was described as the ”jewel in British Rail’s crown” as the workforce produced and repaired railway wagons for use in the UK and all points east.
As both M Salut and I are outsiders by birth, (Hove and Leeds respectively) we were not part of the tradition that Shildon lads followed their dads to Shildon shops – although M Salut was employed in the offices before he embarked on his career as an ace reporter. Shildon without the Shops was unthinkable – but not to Mrs Thatcher and the British Rail board who finally pulled the plug on 159 years of industry when they closed the works in 1984.
That the town would go into steep decline was to be expected as 2,300 jobs disappeared. Even the railway heritage industry seemed embarrassed by this small outpost in County Durham. A few memorials were put up but the huge sidings, once described as the biggest in Europe, quickly became overgrown and the town itself turned its back on the railways.
That was until the National Railway Museum needed a place to display the parts of its extensive collection that were unseen. Looking around for sites, they plumped for the old sidings and, with help from Durham County Council, built a large exhibition hall to house the exhibits.
Opening a decade ago, it was hoped to attract 60,000 visitors a year, but that number was exceeded in its first year by 34,000, despite the collection being in its formative phase. An old railwayman friend of mine described it as “all the rubbish that York doesn’t want” but he had changed his opinion by the end of the first year as the NRM made a good job of displaying some important locomotives in their new home.
And so, every year on its opening date, it has an In Steam day, where locos from various railway groups are brought down to steam away. Some pull carriages and give free rides along half mile of track while some of the big beasts of the collection are wheeled out in front of the main hall for folk to admire in the open air – which is where a steam engine should be, not cooped up inside like a caged beast.
The crowds flocked in over the weekend. Children with their parents looking for Thomas the Tank Engine and grandparents with their grandchildren, looking to relive their childhoods and dream nostalgically of steam locos going under bridges and covering those small boys hanging over the parapet in smoke and soot and bits of clinker.
There were photographers and nostalgists, number collectors and sound recordists, those who lived and breathed steam trains and those who merely wanted a pleasant day out.
Children and grown-ups queued to ride the replica of Stephenson’s Rocket and the Bellerophon from the Lancashire coalfield and then queued again for the café and then again for the toilets. The car park was full, the area outside the Great Hall was busy and train whistles were blown to add to the aroma of coal and steam that pervaded the edge of this small town.
The museum has been a success but that has not spilled over into the town. It is a long walk from the Locomotion site to the two main shopping streets and few make that journey.
The fact that the last bank pulled out a couple of years ago has made Church Street even less of an attraction. No more gazing in the window of Coxon’s Men’s Fashions or choosing a settee in Peter Hankey’s Furniture Emporium.
Visitors now could choose between a number of takeaways, a tattoo parlour, a handful of charity shops and a discount supermarket that would not look out of place in a remote Balkan town. There is a butcher, baker and greengrocer and Costa have just opened a coffee shop, although it was empty when I called in this afternoon and disturbed a conversation between the three young female baristas.Happy Birthday Locomotion – here’s to the next 10 years.
* All photographs by Pete Sixsmith except the first image of Locomotion No 1, taken by "Chris55" and reproduced at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Locomotion_No_1. The original locomotive has its home at the Darlington railway museum.
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