How we've gone off the rails.

(From The Northern Echo)

Byline: Chris Lloyd

WEDNESDAY was September 27. I coincidentally was in the Northgate area of Darlington, parked on double yellows, in a bit of a hurry. . . As I got into my car I glanced up, and realised I had never seen the building I was beside in such an appalling condition. All the glass was gone from the upper window and the frame was falling out of the wall - a wall made from small hand-pressed bricks that indicate an elderly age. A lower window had had half its boarding - an old creosoted fence panel - ripped off and the stair window - a beautiful arched piece of glass, possibly coloured, through which sunlight once prettily played - had nailed across it a for sale sign which was so old that it had an 0642 number on it (it changed in 1995 to 01642). September 27 is, as everyone as sad as I knows, the date on which - 181 years ago - the Stockton and Darlington Railway opened. And this building was the home of Edward "father of the railways" Pease. Few buildings can truly claim to have changed the world. This one can. This one's kitchen can. Late on April 19, 1821, two men knocked on this building's front door. Risking a ticket, I wandered to the front in search of the door. It's opposite the grand Technical College, the door now hidden behind the frontages of Domino pizza and Cuisine Marmaris takeway shops. The men, George Stephenson and Nicholas Wood, had travelled from Newcastle on the stagecoach - apparently tipping the driver rather than formally buying a ticket - to Stockton. From there they had walked the route of the proposed railway to Pease's house. One version of the story says they walked barefoot to save shoeleather and used the large erratic boulder opposite Pease's house to re-tie their laces; another version says they took ...