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)