And so, after years of preparation, the great day arrived. ‘All Change’, the official launch of S&DR200, the Stockton & Darlington Railway bicentenary celebrations, on 29 March 2025.
A great year ahead
This day would be the first day of months of celebrations, taking us through to November, and including a re-enactment of the first journey on the S&DR on 26, 27 and 28 September 2025. A grand event to look forward to, but I am getting ahead of myself. First, the bicentenary organisers, S&DR 200, hoped to get things off to a flying start at Bishop Auckland.
Kynren
Could 11 Arches, the Kynren production team. pull off a spectacular at their site on the edge of town? Well, anybody who has seen their summer shows will already know the answer to that. They could.
Why Bishop Auckland?
The town wasn’t part of the S&DR, at least not initially. The line wasn’t extended up from Shildon until 1843. Bishop soon grew into an important passenger and freight nexus, although little is left of the network now. But S&DR200 needed a fitting venue for its opening celebration, and it couldn’t have made a better choice than Kynren.
Celebrity spotting
An afternoon train from Teesside to Bishop Auckland. As I alighted the train, the first thing that I noticed was a camera crew was filming passengers as we did so. As I headed for the exit, I spotted a familiar figure in front of me. I stopped him for a quick chat. It was Michael Portillo, the former politician who now presents railway history programmes.
Career change
Michael explained that he was filming a short series of three documentaries as part of S&DR200. These programmes would begin with the All Change event. The documentaries will be broadcast at the end of September to coincide with the three-day reenactment of the inaugural S&D journey.
Market Square
I walked along Newgate to Market Square to pick up a shuttle bus to the event. A quick visit to the elegant Bishop Auckland Town Hall. The Square has undergone significant renovations over the past number of years, including the opening of the Spanish Gallery. There wasn’t time to visit the town hall or the gallery today. Another time, though.
Shuttle bus
I boarded the free shuttle bus and headed for Kynren, just less than a mile from the town centre. We crossed the Newton Cap Viaduct, which carries the A689 across the River Wear. The viaduct is a poignant reminder of what happened to Britain’s railways, in particular the spider’s web of railways emanating from Bishop Auckland. Trains to places such as Willington, Crook and Tow Law crossed the viaduct until the line closed in 1968. It was converted for road use in 1995.
The arena
We arrived at the Kynren site, an impressive outdoor venue. Michael Portillo and his TV crew were already there, conducting a series of interviews.
Let the carnival begin
Night began to fall, and a bitterly cold wind swept across from the Pennines. You wouldn’t normally be out on a night like this, but the spectacular performance that we were about to witness would make it worthwhile. And all against the dramatic backdrop of Auckland Palace. A bit of trickery here though. The palace in the foreground is a scaled down replica of the original, built in the grounds of Kynren. But if you look carefully towards the top right, you’ll see the real thing, perched on the hill on the far side of the river.
Ring of Iron
The entertainment began with a tour de force. The forty-strong Teesside-based male voice choir “Infant Hercules” with a series of powerful songs themed around Teesside’s industrial past, and the Infant Hercules itself. That would be the world’s first planned railway town, Middlesbrough, built by the S&DR. The highlight of the set was “Ring of Iron”, Vin Garbutt‘s hymn to Teesside steel. Vin, of course, was born in the epicentre of steel making, South Bank.
Son et lumière
If you’ve been to southern Europe, you’ll be familiar with this sort of spectacle. They are less common in the UK, because we don’t have the climate for it. But if you wrap up well, your imagination can take care of the rest. The show began with testimony, recorded in 1873, from somebody who had attended the inaugural day of the S&DR on 27 September 1825. This woman was about to take us on a 200-year journey.
Locomotion No1
Another star of the show was to be a replica of the first S&DR train, which trundled across the stage from time to time. Locomotion No1, and a fleet of five chaldron waggons.
Clocks
Another theme of the day. Before the railways arrived, the UK didn’t have a unified system for recording the time of day. It varied from village to village, roughly based on the longitude of each location. That couldn’t work with railway timetables, and the result was the adoption of Greenwich Mean Time by the Railway Clearing House in 1847. GMT soon became universal across the country.
Outbreak of war
We swept through the 19th Century to the outbreak of the First World War in 1914. 180,000 railway workers left to fight the war. Thousands of their wives and girlfriends ran the railways for four years. But 20,000 of the workers never came back, and were buried in the mud of Flanders. The women performers danced a poignant dance, waltzing with the empty jackets of their lost loved ones. And so we moved on to 1928, and the final victory in the fight for universal suffrage.
What, another one?
Onwards to 1939. The war to end all wars hadn’t lived up to its billing, and the pointless slaughter began again after a break of only 21 years. But this time scaled up to include every continent. The added peril of the Second World War was the untested military theory that the bomber plane would always get through, wreaking devastation on the civilian population. In September 1939, in just four days, 4 million people were evacuated to the countryside, almost all of them by rail.
Doctor Beeching
And now, a clever part of the show. Dr Richard Beeching was hired by the Department of Transport in 1963 to ‘reshape’ the railway system of Great Britain. Spoiler alert, it wasn’t really a reshaping, but an instruction from the car-loving Secretary of State to take an axe to the railway system. The show producers cunningly portrayed Beeching as the host of a cruel ‘Strictly Come Dancing’ style play-off, with railway stations such as Keswick and Blandford Forum being consigned to oblivion, one by one.
1984
Moving on to a horrifying prospect of dystopia, and a post-truth society where the UK has become Airstrip One, war is peace and doublethink is the order of the day. A computer in every home monitoring your every moment, radicalising you into your Two Minutes Hate as you worship Big Brother. But that couldn’t happen here.
Miners Strike
But 1984 was also the year of the miner’s strike, eventually broken by Margaret Thatcher the following year. Over the following ten years, the coal industry of the UK was almost entirely obliterated. A blessing in disguise, as far as global warming was concerned, but the breaking of trade unions and the destruction of the welfare state wasn’t worth this price. Miner’s lamps no more.
Pyrotechnics and the Wow Factor
That image of a miner’s lamp, and many like it, were created using drones. For those of us who’d never seen it before, this was a revelation, as pyrotechnics were created out of thin air.
Channel Tunnel
1994 brought us the opening of the Channel Tunnel. A joint project by the governments of the UK and France, and the zenith of unity in Europe. How far we have fallen since then. 22 years later, a handful of foreign billionaires decided that we didn’t need peace on this continent anymore.
So this is the future?
We came to the end of our 200-year journey. But the railway story will live for a lot longer. We’ll eventually come to our senses, and realise that covering the country in more and more tarmac is ruining things for everyone. But well done to S&DR200, 11 Arches and the town of Bishop Auckland for putting on a memorable show.
Further Reading
A whistle-stop tour of the Stockton & Darlington Railway, 27 September 2024
Read this here
Stockton & Darlington Railway: The Top 20 ‘must see’ sites, 6 February 2025
Read this here
Celebrating the Women of the Stockton & Darlington Railway, 26 March 2025
Read this here
