The Stockton and Darlington Railway
Despite the sedate pace overall, so the story goes, Stephenson could not resist dismissing the horseman and touching fifteen miles per hour in one short burst.* At last the train clanked into Stockton, the Yarm band struck up God Save the King, and the opening day was declared a triumphant success.*
At once the line was busy with passengers: over 30,000 travelled the line in twelve months from July 1826, mostly in horse-drawn carriages running on the rails, at one-and-six per head.* But it was the increased coal traffic that transformed the region. Within three years, Durham pits were sending over 50,000 tons of coal over the line to staithes at Stockton on the River Tees, bound for London.* In Stockton itself, the price of coal had halved. Soon, ever-larger collier ships required the deeper waters of the Tees estuary at Middlesbrough; and twelve months after the railway reached it, the tiny village had swollen to a busy town of two thousand. As the railway spawned more branches, the 4ft 8in gauge Stephenson had brought over from Killingworth and Hetton became (with an extra half inch) the standard, for the region and for the world. Today, nearly sixty percent of the world’s railways, and most high-speed lines, use the Stockton and Darlington’s gauge — the width of a Killingworth pit pony.
The slow times were owing in part to stoppages: that first three hours had included three shoppages totalling some fifty-five minutes. “At Darlington, the train halted for half-an-hour” local historian Michael Heavisides recorded. “No. 1 was taken to a company’s reservoir to replenish her water barrel. Six waggons of coals and twenty-three of the horse waggons, laden with workmen, left the main line, and were taken down to the depot. The horses were taken out to bait. The coals were distributed to the poor of the town, and the workmen were entertained to a right good dinner, washed down with copious libations of ale in the various public-houses in the town. No. 1 having filled her water barrel, the six waggons of coal having been taken off, and the waggons containing Mr Meynell’s famous Yarm band, having been coupled on, the train started.”
For one man it was a bitter-sweet day, and that was Edward Pease, the farsighted and open-handed owner of the line. “That day Edward Pease’s son Isaac died,” wrote railway historian W. J. Gordon, “and in the silent room he heard the distant cheers telling him how his work had received its completion in the hour of his bereavement.”
A staithe is a (wooden) construction built over a river, designed for wagons to drop coal down into ships beneath. The most extensive staithes remaining today are those at Dunston in Newcastle-upon-Tyne.