A regional daily has landed a “one-in-a-million” story after tracking down a railway station’s only passenger in a whole year.

The Northern Echo successfully traced travel vlogger Paul Lucas, the only person to catch a train at one of the UK’s least used stations, Teesside Airport.

The Darlington-based Echo revealed earlier this week that the station had welcomed just two passengers in the previous 12 months and the story prompted the newspaper to find Mr Lucas, who runs a YouTube channel cataloguing trips he makes around the world.

He revealed he had accounted for both trips made from the station in the past year after the Echo managed to track him down via social media.

The discovery of Mr Lucas featured on the front page of Thursday’s Echo

The subsequent story by Echo Teesside reporter Laura Nolan impressed the paper’s former editor Peter Barron, who jokingly urged the paper’s audience and content editor Nick Gullon to now focus on finding Lord Lucan and Shergar.

Excellent! Can you now track down Lord Lucan and Shergar please. https://t.co/qPBlP7WzSV

— petebarronmedia (@PeteBarronMedia) December 1, 2021

Current Echo editor Karl Holbrook told HTFP: “We discovered annual figures on train passenger numbers and found Teesside Airport was one of the lowest in the country.

“After doing the original story we tracked down a passenger after he tweeted that he’d used it and it transpired he was the only one.

“It was one of those one-in-a-million chances but the response has been great.

“We’ve now been tasked with tracking down Shergar and Lord Lucan, on the back of it.”