Darlington; Wednesday, 02 June, 2021

Darlington is perhaps most well know for it’s connections to railways. The worlds first steam engine hauled passenger rail service started in 1825 on the Stockton and Darlington railway as it carried coal from the Durham mines above Shildon down through Darlington and onto the docks at Stockton-on-Tees. Whilst the concept of a passenger railway wasn’t new, nor was the idea of a steam engine hauled train, the S&D was the first to combine all these elements and is given credit as being the founding point of the Rail network in the UK, and eventually the globe.

Whilst the coal mines may no longer be producing or using the railways, a lot of the land that their sidings and yards took up have been put to new uses, and up near the start of the line at Shildon a large area has been converted into a modern railway museum that charts the history of rail travel in the UK.

Locomotion is the County Durham off-shoot of the York based National Railway Museum. The museum focuses more, as it’s name would hint, on the engines and power plants of the railway, rather than historic trains or royal carriages (though there are still a couple of examples of that, along with an original S&D carriage). Some of the key exhibits include the original Locomotion No.1 that launched the S&D line, the prototype of the Advance Passenger Train – that turned into a giant white elephant, as the High Speed Train – that is credited for saving British Rail and as of visiting was still in daily use by a small number of operators. In fact just a couple of days before visiting the power car that had set the world record for fastest diesel train had been retired from it’s last operator – East Midlands Railway- and moved to Locomotion as a key part of the national collection.

I hadn’t planned much for the afternoon, as I wasn’t certain how long I’d need at Locomotion, but I had purchased a bus ticket that let me travel across the whole of the North East of England, so I decided to head out for a ride into the countryside.

First stop was to get the bus back into Darlington, where I was able to quickly change onto a bus over to Middlesbrough and again made a very quick connection onto the X93 bus across the North York Moors.

The X93 starts in Middlesbrough, heads up over the moors to Whitby before continuing on south along the coast to Scarborough – a journey that takes a couple of hours in full, but I was only going to do the first part up over the moors and down into Whitby. The journey was very picturesque, once we’d left the urbanisation and industry of the Tees valley behind, with wide open views across the moors being helped by being on the top deck of a double decker bus. However, as we approached Whitby it became clear that the weather on the North Yorks coast wasn’t quite as good as it was inland as we hit a thick fog bank that was lapping a couple of miles inland. By the time we finally got down to the harbour side in Whitby visibility was barely a hundred meters and the temperature had taken quite a dip.

I had originally planned on having a wander around Whitby, but the weather soon put paid to that, so instead I headed back to the bus station to continue my journey back up the coast on the bus towards Saltburn. However, as I got to the bus station, in time for the 5pm bus, it was clear that the 4.30 bus still hadn’t arrived with massive queues everywhere. Eventually two buses pulled in together just after 5pm, with one deciding to go out of service meaning there was no way everyone would fit on the one reaming bus, and still maintain social distancing, so I decided to hold back at catch the 5.30 instead, which was quite a lot emptier.

The X4 heads north up the coast from Whitby through some of the former coal mining villages of County Durham, such as Easington, before reaching the seaside resort of Saltburn-by-Sea. I decided to hop of here, to have a look around, and partly because the fog had now lifted to stopping a few feet off of the coast – creating quite a weird site of whisps of fog lapping at the tops of the cliffs whilst the sea lapped at the bottom.

I had a bit of a wander around Saltburn and then headed to the train station bus stop to see the time of the next bus back to Middlesbrough to connect back into Darlington. It turned out that I’d arrived just at the point that buses had dropped from every 30 minutes to every hour, and I had quite a bit of a wait ahead of me. Alternatively, there was a train heading straight back to Darlington due to leave in about 15 minutes time, so I grabbed some dinner from the Sainsbury’s next to the station and brought a train ticket.

The train ride from Saltburn includes travelling between the outskirts of Stockton back to the edge of Darlington on that original railway line, that’s still in service 196 years after it opened.