Stockton and Darlington Railway

• 1. Introduction

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  The Stockton and Darlington Railway opened on the 27th of September 1825, and nothing about public transport would be quite the same again. Between 450 and 600 people clambered aboard that first train, most of them riding in empty coal waggons, some perched on top of waggons still full of coal. A man on horseback carrying a flag rode ahead of Locomotion No. 1. Riders on field hunters tried to keep pace with the procession and fell behind. The train reached 15 mph on the final approach to Stockton, before a man clinging to the outside of a waggon fell and had his foot crushed by the vehicle behind him. That evening, 102 people sat down to dinner at the Town Hall to celebrate.

  This was the world's first public railway to use steam locomotives. It began as a way to move coal out of the inland mines of County Durham. It became, within a few decades, a railway empire stretching from the coast at Saltburn to the Pennine passes and beyond. How did a modest colliery line end up reshaping a stretch of north-east England, founding a new town, and proving to the world that steam could do what horses could not? Those are the threads this documentary will follow.

• 2. The Quaker Line

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  Edward Pease stood up at a public meeting in Darlington on the 13th of November 1818 and promised investors a five per cent return. The railway that would carry their money was already entangled in the politics of land and class before a single rail was laid. A private bill presented to Parliament in March 1819 was defeated by 13 votes, largely because the proposed route crossed the Earl of Eldon's estate and one of the Earl of Darlington's fox coverts.

  Pease and the promoters tried again with a revised route, and again. A second application was deferred early in 1820 when King George III died, making it unlikely any bill would pass that parliamentary year. The promoters lodged a fresh bill on the 30th of September 1820, but the required four-fifths of shares had not yet been sold. Pease subscribed £7,000 of his own money, and from that point wielded considerable influence. The line became known, informally, as "the Quaker line": a majority of the managing committee were Quakers, approximately two-thirds of the shares were sold locally, and the rest were bought by Quakers from across the country.

  The act that finally received royal assent on the 19th of April 1821 permitted a railway open to anyone with suitably built vehicles, on payment of a toll, closed at night. It said nothing about steam locomotives. The managing committee, formed on the 12th of May 1821 with Thomas Meynell as chairman and Jonathan Backhouse as treasurer, designed a seal showing waggons pulled by a horse. They adopted the Latin motto Periculum privatum utilitas publica: at private risk for public service.

• 3. Stephenson Takes the Survey

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  George Overton had surveyed the original route, but Edward Pease had doubts about his competence. On the 12th of May 1821 he arranged for George Stephenson, then an experienced enginewright at the collieries of Killingworth, to meet him in Darlington. By the 23rd of July the committee had resolved that the line would use edge rails rather than a plateway, and Stephenson was appointed to re-survey the route.

  Stephenson was assisted during the survey by his 18-year-old son Robert. He recommended malleable iron rails, even though he held a share in the patent for the alternative cast iron rails. He reported by the end of 1821 that a usable line could be built within the bounds of the existing act, but that another route would be shorter by 3 miles and avoid deep cuttings and tunnels. The shareholders elected Stephenson as Engineer on the 22nd of January 1822, with a salary of £660 per year. On the 23rd of May 1822 a ceremony in Stockton marked the laying of the first track at St John's Well, the rails set to the same gauge Stephenson had used on his Killingworth Railway.

  Stephenson pressed hard for steam locomotives. He took the directors to visit Hetton colliery railway, where he had already introduced them. A new bill requesting the deviations from the original route and the use of "loco-motives or moveable engines" received royal assent on the 23rd of May 1823. The line would include embankments up to 48 feet high. Stephenson designed an iron truss bridge to cross the River Gaunless. The Skerne Bridge over the River Skerne was the work of the Durham architect Ignatius Bonomi. In 1823, Stephenson and Pease together opened Robert Stephenson and Company, a locomotive works at Forth Street in Newcastle, from which the S&DR ordered two steam locomotives and two stationary engines the following year.

• 4. Coal, Passengers, and Trouble

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  The railway that opened in September 1825 was 25 miles long, running from Phoenix Pit at Old Etherley Colliery to Cottage Row in Stockton, with branches to Darlington, Yarm, and the Hagger Leases. It opened with the company already in debt, unable to raise further loans. Pease advanced money twice in early 1826 so the workers could be paid.

  Coal was the primary purpose. In the first three months the line carried 10,000 tons and earned nearly £2,000. In Stockton, the price of coal fell from 18 shillings to 12 shillings, and by early 1827 had dropped further to 8 shillings and 6 pence. The first staith at Stockton opened in January 1826, designed so waggons could discharge coal directly into a ship's hold. About 18,500 tons reached ships in the year ending June 1827, rising to over 52,000 tons the year after, representing 44.5 per cent of the total carried.

  Passenger traffic began on the 10th of October 1825, after the required licence was purchased, using the Experiment coach drawn by a horse. The initial timetable allowed two hours from Stockton to Darlington for a fare of 1 shilling. By April 1826 the journey had been cut to 1 hour 15 minutes. A second coach, Express, started that same month and charged 1 shilling and 6 pence for travel inside. Innkeepers began running their own coaches in competition. Between 30,000 and 40,000 passengers were carried between July 1826 and June 1827.

  The locomotives were a persistent headache. Locomotion No. 1 broke a wheel soon after opening. Hope, the second locomotive, arrived in November 1825 but needed a week of preparation, with cast-iron wheels causing trouble. In 1828, two locomotive boilers exploded within four months of each other, each killing the driver; both explosions were caused by the safety valves being held down while the engine stood stationary. That August, 16 shillings and 9 pence was spent on ale to motivate the men maintaining the engines. Timothy Hackworth, the locomotive superintendent, used the boiler from the unsuccessful Chittaprat to build the Royal George at the Shildon works; it entered service at the end of November. By August 1827 the company had cleared its debts and shares had risen from £120 at the start of that year to £160 by its end.

• 5. Founding Middlesbrough

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  By 1826 the coal trade had become the railway's main business, but the staiths at Stockton were too small and the Tees too shallow at that point to accommodate larger ships. A branch to Haverton on the north bank of the Tees was discussed, but in July 1827 the engineer Thomas Storey proposed a shorter and cheaper line to Middlesbrough, south of the Tees. George Stephenson approved the plan and the shareholders ratified it on the 26th of October.

  Before May 1829, Thomas Richardson had bought about 500 acres near Port Darlington. Together with Joseph and Edward Pease and others he formed the Owners of the Middlesbrough Estate to develop the land. Middlesbrough had only a few houses before the railway arrived. A year later it had a population of over 2,000. At the 2011 census the city had over 138,000 people.

  The line to Middlesbrough required a suspension bridge across the Tees. Designed to carry 150 tons, the bridge cracked its cast iron retaining plates when tested with just 66 tons, and loaded trains had to cross with waggons split into groups of four, linked by a 9-yard chain. For the opening ceremony on the 27th of December 1830, the locomotive Globe, a new design by Hackworth built for passenger trains, hauled people across the bridge to the staiths at Port Darlington, which had berths for six ships. Henry Pease, a S&DR director, walked to Saltburn in mid-1859, then a cluster of fishermen's cottages, and described to his brother a "sort of prophetic vision" of a town with gardens. He and other directors planned the town, with gardens and a Zetland Hotel by the station, and the coastal extension opened in 1861.

• 6. Iron Ore and Financial Crisis

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  By the late 1840s the S&DR was near collapse. The lease of the Wear Valley Railway and Middlesbrough and Redcar Railways required annual payments of £47,000, exceeding the company's net revenue. Traffic from the Derwent Iron Company fell during a period of financial difficulty and the Black Boy colliery switched its coal to Hartlepool. No dividend was paid in 1848 or for several years after. The company announced a bill in November 1848 to permit a merger with the York, Newcastle and Berwick Railway, but withdrew it when that company's chairman George Hudson resigned following questions about his share dealings. By 1850 the S&DR had share capital of £250,000 but owed £650,000.

  The rescue came from the ground itself. In mid-1850, Henry Bolckow and John Vaughan discovered a seam of iron ore at Eston. They opened a mine, laid a branch to the Middlesbrough and Redcar Railway, and began hauling ironstone over the S&DR to their blast furnaces west of Bishop Auckland. By 1851, Derwent Iron had opened its own mine in the area and was moving ironstone 54 miles to Consett. Between 1849 and 1853 the S&DR's traffic more than doubled. The company paid the arrears on its debt and paid a dividend in 1852, albeit only 4 per cent. After the dividend was restored in 1851, by the end of 1854 payments had recovered to 8 per cent and did not drop below that level again.

  Cleveland iron ore is high in phosphorus and must be mixed with purer ores from the west coast in Cumberland and Lancashire. In the early 1850s this ore was travelling the long way round via the Newcastle and Carlisle Railway. Both the South Durham and Lancashire Union Railway and the Eden Valley Railway were formed on the 20th of September 1856. The South Durham and Lancashire Union crossed the Pennines via Kirkby Stephen to meet the West Coast Main Line at Tebay. The Eden Valley Railway followed the east bank of the River Eden from Kirkby Stephen to the West Coast Main Line near Penrith via Appleby. These routes were surveyed by Thomas Bouch. The line crossed Stainmore Summit at 1,370 feet. Valleys were spanned by viaducts, three made from wrought iron, including the Belah Viaduct, which was 1,040 feet long and 196 feet high.

• 7. Absorption and Afterlife

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  With 200 route miles of line and about 160 locomotives, the Stockton and Darlington Railway became part of the North Eastern Railway on the 13th of July 1863. A clause in the amalgamation act preserved its identity: the railway was managed as the independent Darlington Section until 1876, when the lines became the NER's Central Division.

  The 1875 jubilee saw a locomotive exhibition at the Darlington North Road workshops, the unveiling of a statue of Joseph Pease in Darlington, and a banquet. At the centenary in July 1925, an exhibition of rolling stock at the new Faverdale Wagon Works was opened by the Duke and Duchess of York, later King George VI and the Queen Mother. The following day the royal couple watched a procession of locomotives pass between Stockton and Oak Tree Junction, starting with a Hetton Colliery locomotive built in 1822 and ending with a replica train hauled by Locomotive No. 1 propelled by a petrol engine in a specially built tender.

  On the 31st of August 1975, a cavalcade between Shildon and Heighington marked the 150th anniversary, led by a replica of Locomotion and completed by the prototype high-speed train. That same year the National Railway Museum opened in York, combining exhibits from the former London and North Eastern Railway museum, which had itself opened after the 1875 festivities, with those from the National Transport Museum at Clapham. In 2025, the replica made a three-day journey from Darlington to Stockton for the 200th anniversary.

  At Darlington, the station buildings and goods shed are Grade II* listed as the Head of Steam museum. Skerne Bridge, designed by Ignatius Bonomi and part of the original 1825 line, is the oldest railway bridge in continuous use in the world. On the 14th of June 2007, during excavations for road building, some of the original stone sleepers from 1825 were discovered intact near Lingfield Point, each weighing about 75 pounds, with bolt holes still visible for the chairs that once held the rails. Much of the original route now carries the Tees Valley Line, operated by Northern.