Celebrating the first railway - or was it?

The 200^th anniversary of the railways has been celebrated this weekend – well sort of. Huge events have been taking place around the North East to mark the opening of the Stockton & Darlington railway in 1825 with runs of the replica Locomotion, the first steam locomotive to haul passengers, and lots of opportunity to view the original. The railway industry has made good use of the anniversary, both to highlight the history of the industry but also to showcase the modern railway.

I am right behind the idea of celebrating a key moment in railway history but there has been a tendency to somewhat exaggerate the importance of this little line running through the North East of England. Don’t get me wrong, I am enjoying the extra coverage being given to the railways and I have two books badged to mark the anniversary, a new edition of Fire and Steam (available for £20 post free for subscribers from me) and a completely revised edition of The Iron Road, with amazing pictures which will be published as The Rise of the Railway, by Dorling Kindersley next month. However, in reality, the Stockton & Darlington was not really a pioneering railway but merely a pulling together of the existing technology accompanied by a very clever publicity campaign

There had been numerous similar lines, whose main purpose was moving coal and other minerals to waterways, built in the previous century in many places across Europe and indeed there was a network of such waggonways across the North East of England. These lines had used iron rails to facilitate the movement of wagons, and these were hauled either by the use of horses and donkeys, or simply human beings.

The Stockton & Darlington’s main claim to fame is that it was the first public railway to use a steam engine to haul a passenger train. However, it was not really the first to carry out either of these tasks. There had been several steam engines used to haul coal in the previous quarter of a century, most famously Catch Me Who Can developed by Richard Trevithick and put on display at a site near the present Euston station as far back as 1803.

The public had already long used the Swansea & Mumbles Tramway to travel along the South Wales coast which opened in 1807. They sat in coaches hauled on the tracks by horses and the tramway lays claim to being the first passenger railway service.

The Stockton & Darlington mostly used horses to haul the trains it carried and it had a fairly rickety single track line that was open to all comers prepared to put their wagons on the tracks. There was no regular timetable and given their were few passing points, trains were often delayed when they met each other on the tracks as there were no particular rules as to who should be given priority. The Stockton & Darlington, was merely the last of the waggonways, an invention that paved the way for the advent of the railways rather than marking its inauguration. That would come five years later.

The first modern railway, that provided regular steam services between two major cities carrying both passengers and freight was the Liverpool & Manchester opened in 1830. It was double tracked throughout, there were no horses to pull trains and it had a regular timetabled service provided by the railway company which did not allow others to use its tracks. The celebrations to mark the 200^th anniversary of its opening will, hopefully, be far grander than those being held this month as the construction of the Liverpool & Manchester really highlighted the potential of the iron road to change people’s lives.

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The Opening of the Stockton & Darlington Railway, 1825, painting by Terence Cuneo

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