Day 21 - Ice Cream in the Dales

Kirkby Stephen to Whitley Bay

The twenty-first day of my journey dawns in monochrome, with a heavy pencil-drawn sky breathing a thin drizzle over the slate rooftops of Kirkby Stephen. I don't normally mind a bit of low cloud but I'm intending to cross the Pennines today aboard a classic bus, the only possible day I can do so as it only runs on a Wednesday. So I've been looking forward to wide upland views, gentle rounded hills, skylarks, flowers and perhaps the occasional sheep dancing in the breeze. Oh, well.

This once-weekly bus service to Barnard Castle is operated by a splendid company called Cumbria Classic Coaches which, as their name suggests, operates a fleet of classic vehicles. The weather may be poor but I console myself with the thought that at least I will be travelling in an historic vehicle again, even if I can't see further than the hedge at the side of the road.

I’m soon joined at the bus stop by a gaggle of elderly ladies carrying empty shopping baskets. It's clear that they aren’t here just to take a nostalgic bus ride, though. Wednesday happens to be Market Day in Barnard Castle and it looks like everyone is off for a day’s shopping on their concessionary travel cards.

A stately double decker bus soon bowls into view, a 1959 Bristol Lodekka complete with a driver in his cab at the front and a conductor on the back who seems to know everyone by their first names. He greets and assists his passengers with the elaborate courtesy of a 1920’s ocean liner steward before pressing the bell, signalling the start of our journey into the thick, penetrating drizzle that is now wreathing the Pennines.

Despite being more than 50 years old, our rattly old Bristol – affectionately named Harvey, I later learn – makes a surprisingly fair fist of the long climb upwards. Even though Harvey dates from a time when Cliff Richard was regarded as a young and slightly dangerous upstart, old Harvey was clearly still well up to the job, assisted by a driver who clearly knows his foibles and stirs the old-fashioned gearbox like an expert. 

Despite the rattles, Harvey represents pretty much the pinnacle of a design that can trace its roots back the old B Type I described prerviously - driver at the front, open platform at the back. What separates the two are forty years of development, though bus design actually took a large backward step immediately after World War One. 

Ford Model T bus

Manufacturers were slow to get started after the war so the boom in demand for public transport was met largely by the ready supply of ex-army vehicles and a rash of cheap imports which resembled large cars under a sort of minibus body. Many of these were supplied by companies which would become familiar names in the car industry, such as Chevrolet, Lancia and Fiat. Ford, too, entered this market by adapting their Model T for bus use by lengthening its chassis. This unlikely vehicle ultimately became the most numerous small capacity bus imported into the UK after the war. Its tiny 8hp engine and 2-speed gearbox meant that a Model T bus was unlikely to offer its passengers a stimulating ride, but then the speed limit for buses was restricted to 12mph anyway. 

Bus design was severely regulated, often to the point where regulation lagged some way behind innovation. Take the General NS bus, for example, a double decker introduced in 1923. This was cleverly designed to have a low centre of gravity so that it could bear the extra weight of a roof over the upper deck. However, it took two more years before the regulations were amended to even allow double deckers to have roofs. When pneumatic tyres were similarly introduced on the NS in 1928 the regulations had to be changed yet again because the tyres made the vehicle 4cms wider than the regulations allowed.

Leyland Gnu Pic: Kitchener.lord

But innovation was constant. In the same year, Crossley introduced the first bus to be fitted with a diesel engine. Two years later, pre-selective gearboxes appeared on Daimler buses. There were side-engined buses which permitted the novelty of a passenger entrance at the front, as well as rear-engined and underfloor designs. There was a smattering of six-wheelers, too, including the distinctively odd Leyland Gnu which had four wheels at the front and two at the back. Buses became quicker, longer, wider and able to carry more passengers.

Harvey might have been one of the last half-cab designs to enter service, but not the last. That distinction goes to the London Routemaster, believed by some to be one of the most technically-sophisticated buses ever to enter service in Britain, even though it’s half-cab, open platform design was considered obsolete even as the final models were rolling off the assembly line.

Ten minutes out of Kirkby Stephen and we are into proper upland scenery – wild moorland lined with dry stone walls, a scattering of damp sheep among the nodding heads of wind-blown bog cotton. It’s good to be inside on a day like this, despite the noisy and uncertain rattling of Harvey's fifty year old windows. (I later discovered that the reason for all the noise was that Harvey was, somewhat unusually, factory-built with a removable roof for quick conversion into an open-topper. No wonder the windows were so loose!)

Ice Cream stop, Middleton

Briskly over a cattle grid and we are into County Durham, beginning the long decent into Middleton-in-Teesdale. Here we unexpectedly take a 10 minute break, not for a driver change but for ice cream – yes, really. Honestly, this has to be the most civilised and gentile thing I have encountered on my journey so far. It was brilliant. I got the distinct impression they might even have put on tea and biscuits or a sing-song if someone had asked. 

Rested, we stickily make our way back onto the bus for the steady run into Barnard Castle, me to say farewell to Harvey and head onwards to Darlington, the others to accompany one another on a day of gentle tea-drinking and unhurried shopping at the market.

My next bus, a rather elderly single decker to Darlington, is probably a lot quicker but it seems infinitely noisier than old Harvey, if that’s possible. The noise is not unlike the sound of a skiffle band clad in medieval armour trapped inside a tumble drier. So it is a thankfully short trip which brings me to the centre of Darlington, a town widely regarded as the birthplace of the railways. It was here in September 1825 that the world's very first steam-hauled passenger train of 600 passengers - most of whom travelled in empty coal wagons - ran between Darlington and Stockton. 

I am intent on making my own trip to Stockton, not in an empty coal wagon but aboard the X66 to Middlesbrough which from its service number I foolishly assume will be a swift and sleek modern express with coach seats and soft lighting. It isn't – it’s a bus every bit as dismal as the bus that had brought me here, though this time over two floors rather than just one.

Even people who live there might admit that Teesside is probably not an obvious choice for a day out, what with its vast chemical works and everything. However, it’s blessed with something transport-related which can be found almost nowhere else in Britain, and my sole purpose in being here today is to ride on it. 

The 'it' I refer to is the glorious Middlesbrough Transporter Bridge which connects the town on the south bank of the Tees with Port Clarence on the north. And it does so more theatrically than any mere bridge ever could. To cross the Tees you first climb (or drive) aboard a gondola suspended by steel cables from rails high above you head. This isn't a gondola in the Venetian sense, it's really just a steel platform with gates at each end and a shelter to one side so you can get out of the rain. The gondola then makes a stately 90-second journey dangling a few metres above the cold waters of the Tees from one side of the river to the other. It seems an overly dramatic and unconventional way to cross a river but it's design made sound economic sense. A conventional bridge would have presented a serious obstruction to shipping, so a transporter design was adopted to ensure that no matter how big the ship the bridge would never ever get in its way. 

The Middlesbrough Transporter Bridge

Middlesbrough Transporter Bridge carried its first passengers in October 1911 and has been in almost constant service ever since, becoming one of the oldest transporter bridges - of which there are now but a handful - in regular use in the world.

Given its design, its not supposing that it's enjoyed its fair share of mishaps over the years, like the day in 1953 when the gondola got stuck half-way across the river in a gale, its passengers bouncing precariously inches from the storm-tossed Tees while an engineer frantically tried to figure out what to do. Or the day in 1974 when the comedy actor Terry Scott en route to a performance in Billingham mistook it for an ordinary toll bridge and drove his car straight off the end. Fortunately, it landed not in the river but in the safety netting underneath. Whether he himself appreciated the comedy of the situation is not recorded. 

The Germans had a go at bombing it during the second world war, but it was the BBC who finally erased it from the Middlesbrough skyline as part of the TV comedy drama 'Auf Wiedersehn, Pet'. Fortunately it was all done with special effects and the closing titles of the final episode made it clear that despite appearances to the contrary the Transporter Bridge was alive and well and very much still part of the Teesside skyline.

With a bridge as unusual as this I simply had to travel on it, so I leave Middlesbrough’s busy bus station for the 10 minute walk through the town centre to the riverside, ignoring the streams of rain now running down my nose. My excitement is palpable. I’m really looking forward to this.

I duly arrive at the bridge and stare blankly at the sign on the road.

“Bridge Closed”, it says, firmly.

Disappointment doesn’t come close. I’m gutted. This is actually quite serious. I’d been intending to cross the river and then travel all the way up the coast to the Tyne but now I’m facing a massive detour and at least two more buses. Blast.

I trudge reluctantly back to Middlesbrough bus station and begin to review my options. Plan A has clearly failed. Plan B is to catch a bus back inland, then around the chemical works to Hartlepool by another route and pick up my journey from there. It’s a long way round through a dismal industrial landscape drenched in rain, and the only available service seems agonisingly slow. It will take hours. That’s no good.

I hurriedly concoct a Plan C which is to take a bus to Sunderland via Peterlee and then pick up the threads of my journey from there. Not perfect, but near enough. I set off to find my queue and join it. Twenty five minutes later, and a good 10 minutes after its due time, I’m still waiting. The blasted bus isn't coming. No obvious reason for its absence, no polite words of apology on the PA and, more pointedly, no bus. 

Salvation - the X9. Pic: North East Malarkey

That's it. It's the final straw. I'm cold, damp, fed up with buses and all I want to do is go home and not have to live out of a bag anymore. 

Then my luck changes. I spot a rather smart double decker with the number X9 blazed across its flanks and recognise it as a service that passes through Gateshead. If I catch this, I can hop off at Gateshead and pick up a Metro straight home. Besides, I’ve had enough of being bounced around in rattly old buses – I want comfort and plenty of it, and Go North East’s smart and business-like double decker seems to offer exactly what I need.

I hurry aboard and settle back into my comfortable coach seat and we are soon hurtling up the A19 through dense shrouds of torrential rain. Our driver somehow manages to keep the speed up despite the appalling weather which makes for an exhillerating and entertaining ride, and we arrive in Gateshead in about an hour.

The historic Metro 4001

I'm ready to call it a day now and I go underground to catch the Metro straight home to Whitley Bay. But as I wait on the platform, a Metro going in the opposite direction pulls in on the adjacent platform. It's different from the rest. It’s bright yellow, the same yellow that Newcastle Corporation buses used to be, and has the number 4001 on its side, indicating that it was the very first Metro in service, the prototype, the one used to train dozens of aspirational bus drivers to be Metro drivers a full 12 months before the network opened. It’s therefore mildly historic, which is why it's been re-painted in its original egg-yolk livery.

On a sudden impulse, I hop aboard and I’m soon heading down the line away from Whitley Bay and towards South Shields. Well, travelling on Metro 4001 sort of fits with the general spirit of my journey, I reckon, so why not. We arrive in South Shields a short 20 minutes later and a short walk from the station brings me to the ferry landing where I join a throng of commuters for the short sail across the Tyne to North Shields. From there it's one more bus and then I’m back on the Metro for the final leg of my journey home.

Shields Ferry

Actually, it’s good to be home again. Today has been a long one, much of it wet, some of it disappointing, and I’m tired after so long on the road. Now, at last, I am back in the bosom of my family. 

Well, perhaps not bosom exactly. The family appears to have gone on holiday and taken all the food with them which is a little disappointing. I mean, I wasn't expecting bunting and a brass band, but I still feel a bit cheesed off that this is precisely what I don't get. 

So I settle down alone to a quiet leisurely meal of Alphabetti Spaghetti on stale crisp-bread washed down with a bottle of guava juice leftover from Christmas and begin to unpick my journey. I've completed three-quarters of it so far and overall it hasn’t been at all bad. There’s been a few minor glitches, but there’s been loads of great scenery, interesting people, interesting vehicles to look at and ride on, plenty to look at and no constant rummaging around for change for the parking meter. This is going well, I think. If only the family was here to share it...

A short while later, the front door opens noisily and the family tumbles in, laughing and reeking of fun and freshly-eaten pizza.

“Oh,” says Mrs Lynn, surprised. “Is it this week-end you're back, then?”

NEXT: Whitley Bay to Dumfries - which sees me back on the road, this time heading across the border into Scotland where I learn about the cursed city of Carlisle, suffer a bout of over-Scottishness and discover why The Queen of the South has more than a whiff of high-octane fuel about her...

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