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The Hetton Railway The railway earned a special place in history as the first to be designed for steam locomotives only.
1822
King George IV 1820-1830
Music: George Frederick Pinto

© Andrew Curtis, Geograph. Licence: CC BY-SA 2.0. Source

About this picture …

The ‘pit village’ at Beamish open-air museum in County Durham The row of cottages on the left were among those two hundred built for the opening of colliery in Hetton-le-Hole; they were removed from Hetton brick by brick, and relocated to Beamish.

The Hetton Railway
The railway at Hetton-le-Hole in County Durham, opened in 1822, was the first to be built entirely with steam locomotives rather than horses in mind. The new technology helped to create thousands of jobs and bring tremendous prosperity to this corner of northeast England.

HETTON Colliery opened on November 18, 1822, complete with an eight-mile waggonway to the port of Sunderland at the mouth of the River Wear.* Designed by local man George Stephenson, it was the first railway to be operated by steam power alone.

Stephenson built five locomotives for the Hetton line. Since his first – completed in 1814 and named in honour of the General von Blucher who, one year later, helped the Duke of Wellington defeat Napoleon at Waterloo – he had already built around fifteen more in the colliery workshop behind his cottage in Killingworth.

The railway opened up the whole East Durham coalfield, and transformed little Hetton: two hundred miners’ cottages increased the population by roughly fifty percent, and by 1834 some eight thousand people were dependent on the colliery.*

But Stephenson himself had already moved on, appointed in January as engineer to the Stockton and Darlington Railway, the first railway for fare-paying members of the public.

‘Waggon’ was the spelling at the time, and is still acceptable in British English, though nowadays ‘wagon’ is more common. Photos of the line, which closed in the 1950s, can be seen at the website of the Sunderland Antiquarian Society. (Note: The railway was opened in 1822; the date given on the website is a typo.)

Figures from Durham Mining Museum.

Précis

Engineer George Stephenson was brought from Killingworth in Northumberland to a new colliery at Hetton in County Durham, and tasked with building a railway to transport coal to the Wear at Sunderland. He decided that the sole motive power of the line should be steam engines, with no animals, making it the first railway of its kind in the world. (60 / 60 words)

Related Video

A short video looking round the recreated pit village at Beamish Museum, some of which was transported brick-by-brick from Hetton. Note that Beamish is set up to replicate the Edwardian era, almost a century after George Stephenson’s time at Hetton.

Suggested Music

Grand Sonata in E-flat minor, Op. 3 No. 1

1: Allegro moderato con espressione

George Frederick Pinto (1785-1806)

Performed by Míċeál O’Rourke.

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