The great Railway journey in a town of two teams

FA Cup first round: United in hope, Harrogate helps itself to a double helping of glory

They know all about cup fever in Harrogate. At Bettys, the tea rooms where the queue for tables more often than not spills out into Parliament Street, they get through 2,000 cups of tea each day. The former spa town is less well acquainted with the Cup of the Football Association, although David O'Leary, who lives in Harrogate, once supped from it and the late Alf Wight, who spent his afternoon off each week sipping Bettys' finest, did adopt his nom de plume, James Herriot, from the fellow Scot who kept goal for Birmingham City in an FA Cup semi-final against West Bromwich Albion at Villa Park in 1968.

For 131 years Harrogate has been waiting for a run in the FA Cup and now, like the proverbial bus or cab in the metropolis, two have come along at the same time. In the first round on Saturday, Harrogate Railway Athletic play away to Slough Town and Harrogate Town play at Farnborough Town. It is the first time any club from the North Yorkshire town has made it to the first round proper of the beautiful game's oldest cup competition.

For Harrogate Town, long established as the premier club in the town, it is a proud enough achievement – and they play in the premier division of the UniBond League, two steps up from the premier division of the Northern Counties East League, of which Harrogate Railway happen to be members.

"Town" have players with FA Cup pedigrees, such as Neil Aspin, who played in the Leeds United team beaten by Coventry City in the 1987 semi-final at Hillsborough, and Clint Marcelle, who was in the Barnsley side who beat Manchester United in a fifth-round replay in 1998. They also have plenty of pedigree behind the scenes too, with a board of directors chaired by Bill Fotherby, the former chairman of Leeds United.

"Good luck to them," Paul Marshall, manager of Harrogate Railway, said of the rival town club. "They'd never got past the third qualifying round before and we'd never got past the fourth qualifying round, so they've made history and we've made history. I'm pleased to be part of it, but our achievement, I feel, is a lot greater than theirs. We're two leagues lower than them and we have about a tenth of their wage bill.

"We're the second-lowest-placed team left in the competition. There's only Team Bath who are lower than us in status. Nationally, we're at division eight level. Town are in division six."

As their name signals, Harrogate's No 2 club were originally a team of railwaymen. They were formed in 1935 by workers from the locomotive shed of the London and North Eastern Railways at Starbeck, a mile to the east of Harrogate town centre. "We almost went bust because of dear Dr Beeching," Gordon Ward, the club's programme editor and fan of 55 years, said. "They shut the shed down in 1959 and that meant we lost the finance of the railwaymen, who contributed towards the funds, and most of the players, who were all railwaymen up to that time. A huge number of them vanished to work elsewhere. We were left in big trouble for a long time, but we managed to get through it."

Forty-three years on, the home dressing-room at Station View is filled by a latter-day collection of butchers, bakers and candlestick makers. Marshall himself works as a supervisor for a company which manufactures thermoplastic bearings. His captain, the central defender Danny Ames, is studying to be a landscape gardener.

The team also include two postmen, a garden-centre owner and an accountant, who might have been called upon in his professional capacity to keep tally of the goals Railway have been clocking up on their Cup run. They have scored 29 to date, 12 of them in an astonishing two-match tussle with Chester-le-Street in the second qualifying round.

Railway were 1-0 down in the original tie, at Chester-le-Street, when one of the home players attempted to knock an uncontested dropped ball back to Marshall's team, who had a man lying injured on the halfway line. "The thing was he put it in the top corner of our goal, from 40 yards," Railway's manager recalled. "The referee said he had to give a goal and our players were going bananas. They said, 'Well, just let us walk the ball through from the kick-off for a goal'.

"So our centre-forward, Steve Davey, started walking with the ball. The midfielders let him go. Then all of a sudden the last man tried to tackle him and the ball rebounded to the goalkeeper.

"The goalie didn't know what to do. He started walking with the ball to the edge of the area and everyone was shouting, 'Put it in, put it in'. Then all of a sudden he just turned around and clipped it in his own goal to make it 2-1. Ian Atkin, the lad was called. It was a great bit of sportsmanship."

The match finished 5-5 and Railway won the replay 7-2 after extra time. Now, the manager of the North Yorkshire minnows has his sights set on a place in the second round proper – and on outdoing Harrogate Town. Marshall, 40, was Town's left-back for seven years and spent 15 months as their manager. "I was quite bitter when I was sacked," he said. "But there are different people in the boardroom there now and I get on well with their manager, John Reed. I've even got an annual pre-season friendly sorted between the clubs, for the John Smith's Cup. They won the first one this year, 3-1 at their place. I wish them all the best, although obviously I'd like to get farther than they do in the FA Cup."

As a player with Harrogate Town, Marshall never got past the third qualifying round. His brother, Sean, fared rather better. "He scored a screamer for Scarborough against Preston," the Harrogate Railway manager recalled. "It knocked them out of the Cup. Mark Lawrenson mentioned the match on Football Focus the other week, actually." Lawrenson was a teenage rookie in the Preston team beaten 3-2 in that second-round tie at Scarborough in December 1975.

Sean Marshall also scored a winner at Wembley, a penalty that clinched a 3-2 victory for Scarborough against Stafford Rangers in the FA Trophy final in 1976. And, as a non-League manager, he guided Frickley Athletic to the third round of the FA Cup in the 1985-86 season, knocking out Hartlepool United on the way. "Yeah, I've got a lot to live up to," his younger brother mused. "It would be amazing if we could equal what Sean did at Frickley and get through to the third round."