The bicentenary celebrations of the birth of modern rail travel—commemorating the epoch-defining opening of the Stockton and Darlington Railway (S&DR) on 27 September 1825—kicked off in spectacular fashion at the weekend with a one-off sound-and-light show staged at the Kynren showground in County Durham. All Change was the opening event for the S&DR200 Festival, a nine-month celebration of rail.
Inspired by conversations with local historians, All Change brought history to life with large-scale set pieces, including a working, full-size replica of the 1825 Locomotion locomotive. There was also visual feast thanks to a drone show from Skymagic, a global events company based in the north of England. The show was made possible with the support of 140 local volunteers, including 60 performers.
All Change was staged at Kynren, part of the Auckland Project empire at Auckland Castle in Bishop Auckland, home to the Prince Bishops of Durham for 800 years. In the summer months every year, Kynren is a spectacular live-action romp through 2,000 years of English history in the shadow of Auckland Castle’s chapel staged by a cast of 800 volunteers, several galloping horses, a speedy flock of sheep, and a surprisingly well-behaved gaggle of geese.
Over nine seasons, this weekend spectacle—seedfunded by the same former financier who bankrolled the Auckland Project—has attracted nearly 500,000 visitors to what was a former golf course and, before that, a colliery-adjacent farm.
Along with Romans, Vikings, miners and more in the 90-minute open-air show there’s a working replica of Locomotion No. 1, the passenger-pulling steam locomotive that, it’s claimed in the show’s Kevin-Whately-voiced script, kickstarted the global railway revolution because, booms the nationally-famous local actor, almost exactly 200 years ago, the nearby Stockton and Darlington line was “the first public railway in the world.”
All Change was a cut-down—and chilly—Kynren, with Locomotion in regular action.
Speaking before the drone show, festival director Niccy Halifax said:
“We’ve got a huge program. We’ve got exhibitions, we’ve got international artists on board. And we’re expecting visitors from around the world to visit during the nine months of the festival. We’ve had emails from visitors coming from Australia, Canada, and Japan. The idea is build towards September. We’ve got a week in September, from the 20th of September to the 28th, where it’s just going to be jam packed.
“A massive legacy from this project will be a walking a cycling route along the 26 miles of the historic railway. Parts of it open in June and then other bits will open throughout the summer. The route will have an AI footprint via your smartphone telling the story of the railway as you’re walking and cycling along. There will also be nine murals and two public art pieces as well that are going in right now. What we leave behind is just as important as the live stuff.”
Much of the route—between Witton Park and Stockton in County Durham—is currently open to cyclists and walkers but there are unkempt sections that be resurfaced and signed. Interpretation boards at key points along the trail will also be erected.
The trail closely follows the original 26-mile-route of the Stockton and Darlington Railway and passes the first train platform, the oldest railway bridge in continuous use and buildings that housed the cutting-edge technology of the time.
The S&DR Discovery Trail builds on the work undertaken along the route following Historic England designating the S&DR route a Heritage Action Zone (HAZ) in 2018.
The events in the bicentenary will be hosted across the north east of England, including at the expansive Hopetown museum in Darlington which opened last year and incorporates several period buildings such as the 1833 Goods Shed which is now a museum shop and cafe.
The adjacent North Road Station Museum is housed within a still-in-use 1842 Victorian railway station, highlighting Darlington’s legacy of rail engineering. Also at Hopetown Museum is Wagon Woods, a pay-per-child railway-themed adventure play park.
The 21-year-old Locomotion rail museum will also host events, including in the New Hall which expands what was already a gargantuan display of historic rail vehicles into the largest and most awe-inspiring such collection in Europe.
Since soul-crushing job losses in the 1960s through to the 1980s, rural County Durham has been one of the most deprived parts of the country. It’s likely cold comfort to those who lost their jobs, but the area is now evolving into a tourism hotspot, with Locomotion alone predicted to soon attract 250,000 visitors a year. (The museum employs 48 people.)
Locomotion
The first steam engine on the S&DR—known as Locomotion No. 1 for 170 years or so—pulled 27 waggons along this first “Permanent Way” on its opening day on 27 September 1825. This linear event was said to have been witnessed by 40,000 or so spectators entertained by a band in the final waggon “playing cheering and appropriate airs.”
The pivotal early locomotive—a travelling steam engine rather than one fixed to the ground—puffed through the Stockton and Darlington Railway’s Georgian landscape. The 26-mile line was mainly used to transport coal to market, but it also carried fare-paying folk and was an important stepping stone in the development of passenger railways, pre-dating the better-known Liverpool to Machester railway of 1830, which is world famous for the Rocket locomotive and was designed from the get-go to be a city-to-city line. (George Stephenson was involved with both railways, and his Newcastle locomotive factory also supplied the first steam engines that worked them.)
Locomotion Museum houses 47 engines and carriages from the early Stockton and Darlington Railway. Why, in 2004, did London’s Science Museum open such an impressive—and free entry—attraction in a small, tucked-away town some 62 miles from the National Rail Museum in York? Because Shildon was the world’s first “railway town,” created from scratch to house a wagon works operational from 1833 through to 1984 when the plant still employed more than 2,500 people.
The Stockton and Darlington Railway has been billed as the world’s first passenger-carrying rail line since 1875 thanks to the forgotten Victorian figure James Stephen Jeans. Jeans wasn’t a rail financier, a locomotive engineer, or a wayleave-granting landowner; he was a jobbing journalist. It was 29-year-old Jeans, an eager young wordsmith for hire, who was most responsible for shaping the story of the opening of the Stockton and Darlington Railway as the “greatest idea of modern times.”
In April 1875, Jeans was commissioned by the directors of the North Eastern Railway, owners of the Stockton and Darlington Railway, to write a book celebrating the line’s jubilee in September of the same year. His swiftly-written 315-page history of the first 50 years of the railway—a giveway book created for cash and based on a biased brief from a company with an aggrandising agenda—propagated several myths about the Stockton and Darlington Railway. Myths that are still current.
Historic England claims the Stockton and Darlington line was the “birthplace of the modern railway system,” used “innovative technology to carry both passengers and freight” and “began the railway age which was to change the world.”
New archival research by an eminent North East historian reveals a far more complex picture, showcasing that railways have a far longer history than most people realise. Les Turnbull, a former university lecturer, has written that, contrary to common claims, the Stockton and Darlington Railway didn’t introduce any ground-breaking technologies—malleable iron rails, cuttings, embankments, large railway bridges, signals, and locomotives existed long before 1825—nor was it the first public railway, and the line wasn’t even the first railway to take paying passengers.
The Surrey Iron Railway of 1801, the Swansea and Mumbles line of 1804, and the Kilmarnock and Troon line of 1812 predated the Stockton and Darlington line as public railways, with the last two lines carrying passengers as well as freight. The Middleton Railway to Leeds was established in 1758 and, in 1812, was the first to use locomotives.
Yet railways are even older than this. Rutways have existed since antiquity, and in 1604, colliery owners built Nottingham’s Wollaton Wagonway in Nottingham. In the 1720s the horse-powered Tanfield Wagonway on Tyneside was constructed with deep cuttings, huge embankments and the world’s first large masonry railway bridge, the Causey Arch.
While the Stockton and Darlington’s inaugural journey on 27 September 1825 featured an experimental passenger coach—named, appropriately enough, Experiment—and 26 other coal wagons, many with passengers sitting on top, the everyday line was worked for several years not by locomotives but by horses. In truth, says Turnbull, the Stockton and Darlington Railway was an obscure coal line for most of its early history. Eight years after opening, only one percent of the company’s revenue was generated from passenger traffic.
There are many other myths surrounding the Stockton and Darlington Railway. A locomotive called Locomotion No. 1 didn’t puff along the line on the opening day—that was a later name for the engine. The locomotive was originally called “Active.”
The Locomotion No. 1 on display in the Locomotion museum is not 1820s vintage or even from the 1830s—it’s an amalgam of parts, with the long working engine frozen in the configuration it had in about 1857 after several key parts had been replaced, Trigger’s Broom style.
Nor is it the Stockton to Darlington Railway as is sometimes written. The mineral line started not in Darlington but at the Witton Park Colliery, close to St. Helen Auckland, a southern satellite of Bishop Auckland. Five miles of this part of the line quickly fell out of use and are today part of the S&DR Discovery Trail.
Visitors can follow the line’s route and climb to the top of the Brusselton incline, where a stationary steam engine once pulled carriages along the line. The engine is long gone, but the buildings remain, and they are now converted into houses.
Later stone sleepers left in situ in several sections give a good approximation of what the original route might have looked like in this still rural landscape.
In Darlington, the Skerne railway bridge, built by George Stephenson for the opening of the Stockton and Darlington Railway, is billed as the world’s oldest railway bridge still in use for its original purpose. A painting commissioned in 1875 for the line’s big-budget jubilee portrays spectators watching the September 1825 opening day but features later retaining walls on Skerne bridge—John Dobbin painted the bridge as it was in 1875, not in its original state.
Many of these myths will be amplified by this year’s festival, which is to be expected—the history of rail travel is complex and often disputed.
What’s not in dispute is that rail travel is more climate friendly than car travel and one of the key selling points of the S&DR bicententary celebration events is that a great many of them are easily accessible by rail. LNER—one of the S&DR200 Festival’s partners—runs the East Coast mainline service between London and Scotland, with stations in York, Darlington and Durham all hosting celebratory events this year.