The gold rush started on 8 June 1850. John Vaughan and John Marley ascended Eston Hills after hearing rumours of abundant supplies of ironstone up there. They hit paydirt, a 16 foot (5 metre) thick ‘main’ seam of gold-coloured iron ore, some of it just lying on the ground. They didn’t waste any time. Within 12 weeks they’d started extracting Cleveland ironstone from a drift mine, sending it by horse and cart to their blast furnaces at Witton in County Durham.
California Dreamin’
Just downhill from their mine, a shanty town called California sprang up to service the mines. The naming of the town was meant as an ironic tribute to the California gold rush that had taken place in the United States the year before. But the irony was lost when the Cleveland gold rush lasted far longer than the American one, a rush which would propel Teesside to become the iron-making capital of the world within fifteen years.
The Iron Horse
Horses and carts couldn’t move large quantities of ironstone. You needed railways to do that. Within months, Vaughan had built the Eston Branch Railway, connecting California to the Stockton & Darlington Railway (S&DR) two miles to the north. From there, the ore was carried to his new ironworks on Vulcan Street in Middlesbrough. Soon there were three drift mines on Eston Hills, each connected by gravity-worked tramways which converged at California. The Eston mines would become the most prolific of the Cleveland ironstone mines. They lasted 99 years until 1949 and produced 63 million tonnes of iron ore.
Beyond Eston Hills
The S&DR’s owner Joseph Pease then turned his eyes to the iron deposits in the Cleveland Hills south of Guisborough. Within two years of the opening of the Eston branch, he’d built the Middlesbrough and Guisborough Railway (M&GR), effectively a subsidiary of the S&DR. The M&GR branched away from the main S&DR line outside of Middlesbrough station, heading south to Nunthorpe to avoid a steep climb of Eston Hills. It then curved east towards Guisborough and ironstone mines at Cod Hill, Spa Wood and Belmont.
A gap in the market
The M&GR wasn’t a popular railway. It was too far away from the iron deposits on the south side of Eston Hills, and didn’t reach the rich East Cleveland mines either. The railway company had built a passenger station at Guisborough as promised, but the M&GR was never serious about passenger traffic, and the station was only served by a token daily train to and from Middlesbrough. Step forward Ralph Ward Jackson, who intended to solve all of these problems by taking on the M&GR head to head.
The Cleveland Railway
I’ve written previously about Ward Jackson’s aspiration to connect the coalfields of County Durham to the ironfields of Cleveland. But the scope and ambition of the planned Cleveland Railway across south Teesside would be a step up from the Clarence Railway on the other side. A freight line would run all the way from Normanby Jetty near South Bank, striking south towards Normanby, then cutting across the lower flanks of Eston Hills near Flatts Lane. It would then swing east to follow the southern slope of the hills towards Guisborough, serving the mines that the M&GR hadn’t. The line would then run immediately south of Guisborough, finally reaching towards the coast at Loftus mine, via Boosbeck and Brotton.
Getting on with the job
Construction commenced in East Cleveland in 1858 but, due to the obstructive tactics of the S&DR, the line through to Normanby Jetty wasn’t completed until three years later. The finished article can be seen on the map below, with the Cleveland Railway, and its partner the Clarence Railway, highlighted in red.
An ephemeral railway
And so an epic engineering feat had been achieved, cutting through 15 miles of rugged terrain, and transforming the shipment of ore from the Cleveland ironstone mines to the hungry blast furnaces of the Tees basin. But the railway wasn’t destined to achieve greatness. Within a few years, the middle section of the route had been closed, and the line ceased to operate as a through route.
The North Eastern Railway
Railway mergers happened rapidly towards the end of the 19th Century. The North Eastern Railway (NER) bought the Cleveland’s rival, the M&GR in 1858, then seven years later bought the WHH&R, parent of the Cleveland Railway itself. The NER quickly began to consolidate the numerous lines that had sprung up to serve the ironstone mines. It connected the eastern section of the Cleveland Railway to an existing line through Saltburn, and built a link between the former M&GR and Cleveland lines west of Guisborough. The section of line between Normanby and Guisborough closed in 1873, having lasted only 12 years.
The legacy of the Cleveland Railway
But the NER had inherited a valuable asset, a pivotal industrial railway with links to the most productive ironstone mines. It would last a hundred years, until the last of the ironstones, North Skelton, closed in 1964. A section of the Cleveland Railway between Brotton and Skinningrove was reopened in 1974 to serve the potash mine at Boulby. This line remains open. The NER also operated passenger services along the line, with services from Guisborough to Saltburn, Loftus and even Scarborough.
Survival
The northern remnant of the Cleveland Railway also prospered under NER ownership. One of the largest of Teesside’s iron and steelworks, Cargo Fleet, emerged next to the line near South Bank. Several brickworks in the Normanby area kept the whole section busy. A map of the Cleveland ironstone railways can be seen below:
Visiting the Cleveland Railway today
Over the past few weeks I’ve visited the parts of the Cleveland Railway that are publicly accessible. Here’s a record of my visit, starting at Normanby Jetty on the river Tees.
The Tees bridge that never was
Standing on the site of Normanby Jetty at the River Tees Viewpoint off Dockside Road in South Bank, you can gaze across the river towards Port Clarence, and imagine the railway bridge that could have been built there to connect the Clarence and Cleveland railways.
Immediately south of here, the Cleveland Railway bridged across the S&DR. This is the bridge that its rival, the S&DR, fought so hard to prevent. The bridge seems to have disappeared as long ago as 1900, but another railway bridge was built immediately adjacent to it. The second bridge connected two parts of the Cargo Fleet works, ferrying blast furnace slag to a huge tip next to the river. The slag heap remained until the early 1970s and, along with another one next to the Cleveland works, was the origin of the derogatory term ‘Slaggy Island’ to describe South Bank. The ‘slag’ bridge is extant, and is pictured below. The second photo shows the former S&DR heading towards Saltburn.
Middlesbrough Road
About 500 metres south of the bridge, the railway reached its first level crossing, intersecting with Old Middlesbrough Road. Two sidings branched from the railway immediately beyond the crossing, one on each side, serving scrap yards. Further along, on Harcourt Road, a hundred saplings were planted next to the former railway line as part of the ‘Plant a tree in 73’ campaign, and they’re still thriving 51 years later. I grew up here too, just around the corner.
The lines
This path along the track bed, which runs from South Bank to Normanby, is simply known as ‘The Lines’ and funding has recently been announced to repair it. For some reason, publicity for the path refers to it as the ‘Black Path’ but that’s a completely different route which I walked earlier this year. A freight spur once branched off to the left here, carrying coal to South Bank gasworks. A few hundred metres later in Teesville, the Trunk Road bridges across the former railway. The road was built from 1921 to 1923, and bridged three railway lines in the short length between Middlesbrough and Grangetown. The handsome Teesville bridge is the second of them.
Normanby not Normandy
Another 15 minutes took me to Normanby. The track bed runs on an embankment next to Smith’s Dock Park. This section is now heavily wooded and secluded, until you reach the footbridge over the Normanby High Street. The footbridge replaced the railway bridge, which was damaged by an over-height road vehicle in March 1966, and demolished soon afterwards.
Flatts Lane
And then on to Flatts Lane and the second level crossing on the railway. As with the first one, the railway forked into three immediately after the crossing. To the left, a short spur to the brickworks at the top of Cleveland Street. Ahead, a passenger branch to Eston. Eston passenger station wasn’t successful and closed in 1929, but the goods station survived until 1966. To the right, the Cleveland Railway curved sharply to the right. The 242 metre summit of Eston Nab can be seen in the distance. The railway swept around to the right of the main escarpment and crossed the Eston Hills at a height of only 85 metres.
Normanby Ironstone Mine
Although the railway crossed the hills at their lowest point, it was still a tough climb, and the gradient picks up notably from here. As the line continued to curve to the right, a freight spur branched off to left to serve the Normanby ironstone mine. The mine closed in 1899, but the embankment of the spur line is extant.
Bob the Builder
The heavy soil of the Tees Valley yielded clay for brickmaking. There were two brickworks in close proximity here, both served by the Cleveland Railway. The railway split into two and re-crossed Flatts Lane on two adjacent level crossings. The route to the right headed towards Ormesby ironstone mine, later converted to a brickworks. The main line headed left, followed by a spur to Normanby brickworks.
Upsall
The Flatts Lane Country Park visitor centre has been built on the site of the brickworks. The line summited Eston Hills then descended towards Upsall, curving 90° to the left towards Guisborough. It crossed Flatts Lane for the third time, this time on a bridge. The bridge is long gone, but its western abutment remains in remarkable condition, considering that it hasn’t seen trains for 141 years.
A lost railway
Heading towards Guisborough, the railway ran just north of, and parallel to, the present day A171 road. There are hardly any traces of the line, and much of it has reverted to farmland, but railway cottages are a sign of former activity.
Guisborough
The railway dived into a deep cutting, but the Guisborough by-pass has been built over this, and the former line has been buried by modern housing on the other side of it. I headed for the Guisborough Branch Railway path at Enfield Chase to pick up the solum of the railway again.
Further Cleveland Railway walks
I’ve described the remainder of the route in three separate North East Bylines articles. In the first one, I described the walk from Guisborough to North Skelton, although in the opposite direction – A Circle Line. This second article describes my walk from North Skelton to Skinningrove, as part of my visit to the forgotten stations of the Middlesbrough to Scarborough railway. Finally, a description of the industrial railway which carried ironstone up the steep incline from Loftus mine to the Cleveland Railway, Skinningrove: The Zig Zag Railway in the Land of Iron.
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