Pity we don't know its name or sex. But half a century ago, a gamekeeper's dog became North Yorkshire's own Lassie. Uncelebrated until now, the dog was a spaniel. Its owner, also now unidentified, lived somewhere north of Northallerton, in the Vale of Mowbray.

A shrewd guess might be that he was employed on the estate created by Teesside ironfounder Sir Hugh Bell, centred on Rounton Grange, between Northallerton and Hutton Rudby.

For in or about 1950, the gamekeeper despatched his spaniel, ten years old, by rail from Trenholme Bar, on the Picton branch from the Stockton to Northallerton line. Heading for retirement with the gamekeeper's son-in-law, its destination was Carrthwaite Farm, in Stainton Dale, between Whitby and Scarborough.

Transported in the guard's van, the dog looked dejected when collected at Stainton Dale station by the farmer, Fred Noble, who lived about a mile away.

Let Ray Carr, the Stainton Dale stationmaster, take up the story: "The following morning, I was surprised to see the spaniel nosing its way along the station platform to the point opposite where the guard's van had stopped the previous day.

"I called to it, hoping to gain its confidence so that it would stay around until picked up by the farmer who would, I was sure, already be searching for it.

"The dog, however, would have none of it and ran away, head and tail down, along the platform and out of sight.

"Later that day, Mr Noble inquired if I had seen the spaniel, explaining that it had been housed overnight in a straw barn, but the moment Mrs Noble opened the barn door to give it food in the morning it sprang past her and ran away.

"For several days, sightings of the dog were reported in the locality, the last being near the Falcon Inn on the Scarborough to Whitby road about ten days after the dog's escape.

"Several people attempted to secure it, but the spaniel would always run away, and on occasions when it found itself almost cornered, it displayed a measure of ferocity in effecting its escape.

"Nothing further was heard of the dog until, some five or six weeks later, it turned up at its old home, having covered the 50 miles across country over which it had never before travelled.

"It was not returned to Stainton Dale and would no doubt spend the rest of its days in the contentment of familiar surroundings and the companionship of its master, who must have had regrets that he ever put such a test to his dumb friend.''

There now. Isn't that good to read? The true tale is told by Ray Carr in a journal that charts his 99-year life (1905-2005), with particular focus on his upbringing at Carlton Miniott, near Thirsk, and subsequent railway career.

Published posthumously, it provides telling detail of not only the final decades of the railway age seen from Ray's (mainly) branch-line perspective, but ways of life that seem even more distant than they are - hence the journal's title, Visions Afar, culled from an old song.

As a young dressmaker, for example, Carr's future mother often carried her sewing machine three miles to and from work.

In young Ray's home, grease from the Christmas goose was kept in jars and used to waterproof the family's boots, usually while they were being worn.

"I still remember the warmth of the greasing operation,'' says Mr Carr in his journal.

His younger brother, James Lloyd Carr, became a noted novelist, whose successes range from A Month in the Country, a haunting tale that was turned into a film with Kenneth Branagh and Colin Firth, through The Harpole Report, hailed by Frank Muir as the funniest-ever book about running a school, to How Steeple Sinderby Wanderers Won The FA Cup, which one reviewer described as "the best football-based work of fiction".

JL also compiled quirky dictionaries, notably one of Extraordinary Cricketers, produced pictorial maps of the old counties and published a string of delightful palm-sized pocket books, one of which is devoted to the wood engravings of Dales' author Marie Hartley.

Ray Carr downplayed himself as "the other Carr". Giving him the spotlight he deserves, his journal reveals him to have been a man of firm opinions.

Sunday school outings often led to Kilburn's White Horse.

"I was disillusioned by its shapelessness and ugliness at close quarters."

School brought regular use of the cane. Mr Carr tells how one boy fled to escape this punishment.

The headmaster promptly strode round to his nearby home, hauled the boy out from under the table and marched him back to receive his strokes.

"It is often said now that a return to this mode of education would be retrograde. I do not think so. One looks back with a fine regard for the parents and teachers who instilled into one a measure of good manners and application to learning by example.''

Other changes receive Mr Carr's personal stick. Writing in 1980, he said: "I have two postcards written by my mother to my grandmother, each card arranging for a meeting the day following that of posting, in 1907.

"Contrast that with the position today, when a letter bearing a second-class stamp takes not less than two days to or from Scarborough, a distance of eight miles."

At that time, Mr Carr was retired at Stainton Dale, where he had spent the last 25 years of his 48-year railway career as stationmaster. In his station's final year, up to the line's closure by Beeching in 1965, its weekly receipts, for passengers and goods, totalled only about £15, to set against a wages bill of £180.

Mr Carr had risen from the ranks of trainee clerks. Discipline was strict. Holidays could be taken only outside the main season.

While based at Leeds, Mr Carr and a colleague would probably have lost their jobs had it been discovered that they allowed a show cat in transit to escape, by opening its box to take a peek. The pair substituted a station cat and heard no more about it.

It might be too much to hope that for both animals the outcome was as happy as for that gamekeeper's remarkable spaniel.

* Visions Afar: The Journal of RW Carr 1905-2005 (Home Farm Publications, £15, plus £5 if ordered from the publisher, J.D. Bramley, Home Farm, Sherburn-in-Elmet, Leeds LS25 6AD).