A Brief Overview of the Stockton & Darlington Railway

Passenger services

In 1925, as part of centenary celebrations following an international railway congress, the future King George VI unveiled a plaque on a small lineside building that read: “Here in 1825 the Stockton and Darlington Railway Company Booked the First Passenger Thus Marking an Epoch in the History of Mankind”. This grand statement is an example illustrating how the S&DR has been cleverly used to market railways every fifty years, drawing on its history as a pioneering railway.

The plaque, (see above) was on the building then known as the ‘Booking Office’ but was not where Percival Tully, the railway’s agent, had booked passengers in 1825. The building was constructed the following year as a weigh house, Tully was its first occupant.

Claiming firsts in various aspects of railway history regularly sparks heated debates because so much depends on precise definitions. On opening day, 27 September 1825, the S&DR did indeed run a train, including 600 passengers hauled by a locomotive, giving rise to the oft-cited claim as the first steam-powered passenger railway in the world.

However, for the first few years, passenger services were subcontracted to other businesses operating individual stagecoaches hauled by horses along the railway, the S&DR treating the railway as a sort of turnpike road, earning passenger revenue via tolls. The demand for passenger services in this largely rural area took the S&DR by surprise: the principal motivation for the railway was to reduce the transport costs of coal from collieries north and west of Shildon to the small towns of Darlington, Yarm and Stockton.

The company focused its limited supply of steam locomotives on hauling heavy freight trains until Timothy Hackworth designed their first dedicated express steam engine ‘The Globe’ in 1830. The company then started to take passenger services in-house, only buying out the last stagecoach operator in 1833. By this time the Liverpool & Manchester Railway (opened 1830) had demonstrated how profitable a steam-hauled passenger service could be. 

There had also been earlier passenger services such as the horse-hauled Swansea and Oystermouth Railway from 1807 . However, it should be remembered that railways are more than just for passengers: freight, both bulk minerals and general goods traffic, was far more prevalent in the 19th century than now. For many railways, freight was more important than passenger services. The S&DR’s first authorising Act of Parliament (1821) specified a whole list of goods to be carried by the railway; its second Act (1823) gave general permission for freight transport but specifically added permission for passengers and locomotives. The S&DR was a public railway (authorised by Act of Parliament) meaning that anyone could pay to use it, setting it apart from most earlier colliery railways which were run for the private benefit of their owners. However again, the S&DR was not the first public railway, being predated by the Lake Lock Railroad near Wakefield (opened 1798), and the Surrey Iron Railway (authorised 1801).

S&DR’s place in history

What marks the S&DR out as being so significant was that in the 1820s it was the most complex railway that the world had seen to date: it was improving steam locomotives and developing operating principles via trial and error; it was growing and returning a healthy profit; and most importantly, it was very open to sharing data and experience with visiting engineers and the promoters of other railways. It was a pioneering railway bringing earlier ideas together, adapting them, and sharing the results , influencing the development of other pioneering railways, many of which it learned from in turn from 1830 onwards.

Planning the railway

The company of the S&DR had been formed in 1818, following years of discussion between businessmen in Darlington, Yarm and Stockton and colliery owners around Auckland to the north and west of the village of Shildon.

The Welsh engineer George Overton designed a horse-drawn railway (the basis of the 1821 Act), but Edward Pease (a retired Darlington wool merchant and major S&DR shareholder) met with George Stephenson around the same time the Act was passed and was persuaded to redesign the railway for steam locomotives.

George Stephenson (1781-1848) was a self-trained engineer from Wylam, Northumbria who had been developing steam locomotives at Killingworth colliery since 1814. In 1821 he was engineering his first railway, the Hetton Colliery Railway, the first to be operated by steam and gravity without the need for horses. The S&DR became his second major project, and he went on to engineer many more railways including the Liverpool and Manchester, being dubbed “the Father of the Railways” in 1857.

Redesigning for locomotives required a resurvey and a new Act of Parliament which was passed in 1823. Stephenson straightened Overton’s meandering route starting at Witton Park Colliery, using steam-powered rope-hauled inclines to cross ridges at Etherley and Brusselton, with horses used to operate the short stretch across the Gaunless valley between the two sets of inclines. Most of the 26 mile main line (35 kilometres of the 42 kilometre route) was designed for locomotive haulage: starting at what later developed into New Shildon (the world’s first railway town), the line ran south-eastwards, passing through what was then open countryside just to the north of both Darlington and Yarm to terminate on the River Tees quayside at Stockton.

Two short branch lines, terminating at coal depots, were also opened in 1825, taking the railway closer to the built-up areas of both Darlington and Yarm. In the first five years lines were opened to more collieries to the west and to a new port further downstream on the Tees, around which the new town of Middlesbrough developed. Edward Pease foresaw the S&DR as the start of a national network with railways extending between Edinburgh and London: The branch line from Darlington to Croft on the North Yorkshire border was later partly reused by the Great North of England Railway and now forms part of the East Coast Mainline confirming Pease’s 1821 prediction.

The S&DR’s wider influence

In 1823, to secure a supply of steam locomotives for the railway, Pease helped finance the establishment of Robert Stephenson and Company in Newcastle, the first purpose-built locomotive manufactory, this under the management of George’s son who was already a talented engineer. The first of six locomotives delivered to the S&DR, later named ‘Locomotion No.1’, hauled the opening-day train and had a long working life with rebuilds and modifications before being saved as a historical artefact for public display in 1857 (Bailey & Johnson 2023).

Perhaps because of Pease’s stake in Robert Stephenson & Co., the S&DR’s resident engineer Timothy Hackworth was encouraged to share data with visiting engineers and promoters of other railways, both at home and abroad. Described as “the great theatre of practical operations on railways” by Edward Booth of the Liverpool and Manchester, the S&DR clearly influenced the development of many early railways including the Saint-Étienne–Lyon (France 1828), Baltimore & Ohio (USA 1830), and the Liverpool and Manchester (1830), the latter also engineered by Stephenson who learnt from mistakes made with the S&DR.

The S&DR continued to be highly profitable and expanded to become a major component of the North Eastern Railway via merger in 1863. The railway facilitated the urban and industrial growth of Shildon, Darlington, Stockton and Middlesbrough. Remarkably, much of the original 1825 route, even including some original structures, remains part of the national railway network.

Further information

Gwyn, D; 2023: The Coming of the Railway, A New Global History 1750-1850.

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