Railway's journey puts Harrogate on the map

FA Cup: Second-biggest club in North Yorkshire town forced to hire turnstiles for historic visit of Bristol City in second round

Like most chairmen in the Northern Counties East League, Dennis Bentley does not have deep pockets. But he still wishes he had dug into them a bit more on a buying mission to Ayresome Park in 1996.

With Middlesbrough about to occupy the Riverside stadium, Bentley picked up 350 of their old ground's seats at an auction price of £2.20 apiece – but to his abiding regret he went home without any turnstiles. "There were 60-odd for sale," he recalls, with a grimace. "The Germans had come across for them and as soon as they saw them they were bidding like buggery at £80 and £90. But the club were nearly giving the last 25 or 30 away."

To this day, turnstiles have remained something of a Holy Grail for Bentley and his club, Harrogate Railway Athletic. They failed in a £50 bid for some of Leicester City's, then picked up one for nothing from Pontefract Colliery FC, only to find it a useless, rusting contraption.

Their mission will finally be accomplished on Sunday morning when a crowd of 3,500 passes through eight hired turnstiles (rental cost: £1,200) to see Railway's FA Cup second-round match with Danny Wilson's Bristol City.

The club's determination to stage the game at their Station View ground, instead of York or Bradford City, will cost them more than they will take in gate receipts. But the £100,000 Sky TV rights will be enough to buy up every turnstile in Middlesbrough, not to mention the £70,000 stand the club needs to accede to the Unibond League First Division, on the eighth level of the football pyramid.

It is a lot to take in for Railway – who cannot even profess to be the No 1 club in a North Yorkshire town which has hardly covered itself in football glory. That title belongs to Harrogate Town, two rungs up the pyramid in the Premier Division of the UniBond League.

Railway have been in the shadows ever since Dr Beeching took his axe to the nationalised railway system in 1959 and wiped out the next-door London and North Eastern Railway marshalling yard which had given the club its name, most of its players and its ground – handed over in return for a penny-a-week contributions from the wages of 300 railwaymen.

The team drifted into the Harrogate District League, sank almost without trace and have been dining out on some fairly inconspicuous cup odysseys ever since. Indeed, the fondest talk in the tea hut has been reserved for last year's run to the fourth qualifying round, ended by Morecambe.

This year's run has even prised cash out of the railway all over again – though, true to form, Arriva Northern were late. They waited until the team's first round win at Slough before pledging sponsorship money.

But the most satisfying part of the journey for Bentley and his manager, Paul Marshall, has been getting one over on Harrogate Town, a club whose merger suggestions were rejected three years ago for fear that Railway would become a glorified reserve team and whose recent attempts to pinch the top scorer, Kevin Smith, have been diplomatically described by Marshall as "badly timed".

By one of those coincidences which belong only to the Cup, the North Yorkshire town had never delivered a team to the first round until this year, when both clubs made it at once. But while Railway were busy progressing, Town were 5-1 down in 35 minutes at Farnborough and never made it back.

That was especially sweet for Marshall, a Town left back for seven years who was sacked as manager of the club six weeks into his second season. "I'm very happy that we've got further than them," admits Marshall. "You need to remember that they're working with a budget of £3-4,000 a week while I'm looking at £450." In the finest Cup tradition, he prepared his players for a luxury outing last night - eight-til-10 at the local leisure club.

After City's 7-0 win at Heybridge Swifts in the first round Marshall puts his chances of winning at just 10 per cent but the statistics suggest that no deficit should allow the Robins fans to perch themselves too comfortably on their vantage point in the Ayresome Park seats. Railway have already clocked up 31 goals in the tournament this year, 12 of them in a bizarre two-match tussle with Chester-le-Street in the second qualifying round.

The first game ended 5-5 and included a goal deliberately scored for Railway by the opposing keeper, in return for one accidentally scored from an uncontested drop ball at the other end. Back on their own pitch, which has a slope of Yeovil proportions across its width, Railway won the replay 7-2 after extra time.

Amid such eccentricities, Railway's first-ever appearance in the FA Vase third round has almost gone unnoticed. Little wonder the team are fourth bottom of the league – only 12 of the club's 27 games this season have been in the league.

Whatever the score on Sunday, the game has provided the club with plenty of fables, like the (genuine) one about the Sky TV producer who arrived in Harrogate to survey the ground, went to Town's stadium by mistake and declared it too small for live TV coverage.

Turnstiles or no, just do not underestimate Railway's home-spun qualities, says the striker Smith, who has seven Cup goals to his name. "I don't think they'll like to play on that slope," he says. "And their dressing room is much smaller than ours."