Goods Going (from The Northern Echo)

Last year the Goods Shed cafe opened at Masham's old railway station with much success. One year on it's still going strong

THE ten-and-a-half mile railway from Ripon to Masham may have been the line of least resistance, more sapling than branch at the best of times. By 1922, just four passenger trains pottered each day along the rural route, calling at Tanfield and Melmerby and taking 21 minutes in their meanderings.

Masham's villa-style station had, for all that, a station master with a four-bedroom house for which he paid just £14 a year, two clerks, two goods clerks, three porters and four platelayers.

The line closed to passengers at the end of 1930, though it was another 33 years before the last freight train ambled uppishly towards the buffers.

In 1962, it's recorded, Darlington MP Anthony Bourne-Arton - whose roots were Tanfield way - demanded in the Commons to know why trains still ran to Masham simply to deliver fresh water to the level crossing keepers and coal for the station master's bright blazing business on the side.

Bill and Flo Grainger have occupied a bungalow on the old yard for 37 years, decided in 2005 to develop a camping and caravan site there, last year opened the Goods Shed café.

Further to emphasise what they say about muck and money, a philosophy dear to many a Masham station master's heart, they're seeking planning permission to convert the old coal cells into holiday cottages, too.

We took Sunday lunch there with the admirable Mr Raye Wilkinson and his wife Kathleen and with Mr Jack Watson, a Shildon lad celebrating his 87th birthday.

Long familiar in North-East football and cricket, he's still bob-a-job scouting for West Bromwich Albion.

Someone had given Jack a corned beef pie for his birthday, someone else a shepherd's pie. Clearly they know the way to the gentleman's heart.

The café's upstairs. Down below is a little exhibition and picture gallery of the line's steamy history - Mr Ken Hoole's invaluable books open at the appropriate place - and a note that Masham finally reached the end of the line in 1963 "at the hands of Dr Beeching".

There's also one of those cast iron signs, issued by the LNER and signed by Mr C N Wilkinson, warning that the penalty for trespassing on the railway was 40 shillings.

Subject to inflation but still unforgiving of trespasses, the maximum fine is now a thousand quid.

The café is stripped pine, cheerful, chatty. The walls have enamel advertising for distemper, candles and other essentials of an earlier age.

Since they don't have an alcohol licence, customers are welcome to bring their own.

Since we hadn't been forewarned, The Boss had already left on a mercy mission to Masham before Raye came, clanking, up the stairs.

Waitresses bustle about like Bertie the Busy Engine, or whichever of Mr Awdry's creations had a particular gift for hard work.

Raye, who's a regular, had forecast that it would be a Sunday lunch like mother used to make. Probably it was even better; that good, that honest, that rewarding.

Main courses, equally as predictably, were pork, beef or lamb - "locally butchered", the menu insists. All are £7.50; they'll do prawn salad and things, too.

The meat was thick and succulent, the gravy aromatic, the Yorkshire puddings first class. Five or six carefully cooked vegetables, cauliflower and broccoli with heads as big as a size-five caser, crowded onto the table like the Tube at rush hour.

There has been much learned debate about the origin of the recently popular phrase "shed loads". Does it, folk wonder, mean as much as might reasonably be fitted into the hut at the bottom of the garden or that which fell off the back of a lorry.

I forget which way the etymological assessors sided. Perhaps they just caught the ghost train to Masham.

Puddings arrive no less abundantly - a corpulent banoffee cheesecake, perhaps, or an overweight apple pie. Coffee's relaxed, everything amiable.

We'd been at the old station more than two hours, and never once looked at the clock. For traditional Sunday lunch lovers, this really is the Goods.

■ The Goods Shed café is open for breakfast, lunch and dinner on Friday and Saturday and for Sunday lunch, when bookings are strongly advised.

THOUGH it's close to home, it's a couple of years since we'd been to the King William IV at Barton, between Darlington and Scotch Corner.

Maybe that's why the impromptu barbershop quartet in the corner broke into Blue Moon.

The pub's really trying: children's playground, pet rabbits and a new crazy golf course out the back - £1 a go, supervised under-18s only. The welcome's friendly, too.

Nothing save steak is above £8; between 5-7pm from Tuesday to Saturday five dishes - steak and ale pie, fish and chips, lasagne, chicken curry and chicken summat else - are two for a tenner.

We ate in a cosy little room out the back, a sort of banquettey suite. The plates were square, the portions huge, the food tasty. I had the chicken wrapped in bacon with a mustard sauce (£7.50), she the fish and chips with additional onion rings the approximate size of Forumla 1 tyres.

Her long-time craving for onion rings is becoming a little worrying: it suggests the longest gestation period in medical history.

With a couple of pints of Bombardier the bill still only amounted to £18. It will be once-in-a-blue-moon no longer.

THE coal-fired White Swan at Stokesley is Cleveland CAMRA's pub of the year, and it's very hard to argue, not least because the Captain Cook brewery out the back produces consistently good ale. Food's restricted to ploughman's lunch, Wednesday to Saturday.

We looked in when Darlington CAMRA presented its beer of the festival awards - Captain Cook won first and third - from the recent Spring Thing festival.

No matter that former Bishop Auckland inland revenue man Ian Jackson is both beer festival organiser and Captain Cook's recently appointed head brewer, the awards were voted by visitors and richly deserved. Not too many Cook's at all.

IN all these years it's the first time I've seen such a thing at a pub - the Castle Arms at Snape has a poster for the Alpha Course, the seekers' guide to Christianity and the Bible. What's called a Snape decision, presumably.

It's not far west of the A1, near Bedale, a lovely village latterly made more glorious yet by hosts of Mr Wordsworth's daffodils.

The Alpha poster is headed "Are you happy with your life?", the only problem that it can really only be seen on the way out. After a thoroughly enjoyable birthday lunch with the younger bairn and his brother - and even though it was one of those for which the expenses really were spared - the perhaps unwanted answer was "definitely".

and finally the bairns (aforesaid) wondered if we knew how a sheep keeps warm in winter. Central bleating, of course.

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