An event caught my eye on social media last week. A talk to be held at Darlington Library on 30 September 2026. The subject would be the Stockton & Darlington Railway, and the talk would be delivered by Caroline Hardie.
World expert
Caroline is one of the foremost scholars regarding the Stockton & Darlington Railway (S&DR) and, as the headline suggests, this talk would be about the Evolution of the Railway Station. Tickets were £3.00 each. A snip, really. I headed along Crown Street towards Darlington library on 30 September 2026. Looking up, the original name of the building Edward Pease Free Library is etched into the stonework.
Centre of learning
The entrance to the library is at the corner of Crown Street and East Street. The library opened in 1885. It’s a handsome building, and it’s astonishing to think that, only nine years ago, Darlington Borough Council intended to close Crown Street Library because it was “too old”. Fortunately, sanity prevailed.
Caroline Hardie was right on time, and the railway chat commenced.
Winging it
Although the S&DR was conceived as a passenger railway, the company didn’t know how the passenger operation would actually work. Nobody did, because it was new. For the first few years of its existence, the S&DR made it up as it went along.
Coaching inns
The only comparable transport model was the stagecoach industry. Stagecoach operators picked up and dropped off their passengers at local inns. The inns would also book tickets and provide refreshments and overnight accommodation. The S&DR would try to replicate this. It wasn’t until the Liverpool & Manchester Railway was built in 1830 that stations were built as an integral part of the infrastructure of the new railway. The L&M benefited from the previous five years of trials, errors and innovations at the S&DR.
Unreliable technology
For the first few years of its existence, the S&DR struggled to maintain the fleet of steam locomotives that were needed to haul its goods operations. The locomotives built by Robert Stephenson & Co kept breaking down, and a substantial percentage of the fleet was unavailable at any given time. This meant that there weren’t any spare locomotives available for passenger trains. So the passenger trains were almost exclusively hauled by horse for the first eight years of the S&DR
Giddy up
The horse-drawn passenger trains resembled the stagecoaches that they were beginning to replace. But the horse drawn trains were faster than their road rivals. Flanged, metal wheels operated with little resistance, so pulling these coaches was a much easier job for the horses than hauling stagecoaches along the rough tracks that passed for roads.
When is a cottage not a cottage?
Caroline talked about the research that had been done in trying to locate where the first attempts at what would become railway stations were located, and how they operated. The archives frequently describe “cottages”, but 200 years ago this didn’t have the precise definition that it does today; some of the cottages being described were substantial buildings. But the worst descriptor to come across is “depot”, because this term was used to describe almost all built spaces, from sheds to warehouses, and anything in between
King Coal
Coal was the mainstay of the S&DR goods operation. As the industrial revolution ramped up, the demand for coal expanded exponentially. The company investors shifted large quantities of coal from County Durham to London, then the world’s largest city, the cash rolled in.
Landsale depots
But there was also a substantial home market for coal. One thing that is consistent in the S&DR archives is “landsale depots.” The depots sold bulk minerals such as coal, limestone, gravel and sand. To deliver their loads, locomotives pulled a train of bottom-discharging waggons on a railway siding, built above a series of stone pens known as “cells”. When the waggon reached the selected cell, a railwayman pulled a pin to release a trapdoor in the bottom of the waggon, and gravity did the rest. It must have been an incredibly noisy and dusty workplace
Yarm or Eaglescliffe?
One of the first S&DR landsale depots was the at the end of the short Yarm branch, which actually terminated in Eaglescliffe, on the other side of the River Tees. All of that dust is bound to give you a thirst. Thomas Meynell opened the New Inn next to Yarm landsale depot in October 1825, only a month after the inaugural journey of the S&DR. The New Inn is now the Cleveland Bay. The small back room still hosts gigs. Here’s how the James Oliver Band blew this room away on 14 February 2025. This marriage of pub and depot would continue on the S&DR for sometime – the taverns providing hospitality and refreshments for depot users.
Stockton depot
There were several landsale depots designed from the outset throughout the S&DR network. The day after Caroline’s talk, I paid a visit to Stockton in search of S&DR artefacts, including the remains of the landsale depot on Boathouse Lane, around the corner from St John’s Crossing.
Ghosts of Stockton
I followed Boathouse Lane for about 50 metres to the junction with Bridge Road. The landsale depot was run from the goods office here on the corner, complete with ghost adverts on the gable end. The building adjoining the goods office is the tavern built by the S&DR in 1826.
Misinformation plaque
Further along from the tavern, a plaque tells how the S&DR booked the first passenger here in 1825. It didn’t. Was this the world’s first railway booking office, as many people think it was? No, the first passenger was booked at Cottage Row, about 300 metres away. Did it sell tickets? No.
The railway that got the world on track
The plaque can be seen in the background of this photo of St John’s Crossing. I’m standing on the site of the level crossing. The railway line to Darlington headed away from the camera. Behind me, it made its way to Cottage Row. The Centenary historians of 1925 got a few things wrong about this location, but one thing remains true. On 23 May 1822, S&DR Chairman Thomas Meynell, who we heard from earlier, ceremonially laid the first rail here, ten days after work started. There’s no doubt that this epoch-making event occurred here.
Information plaque
Thomas Meynell’s gift to posterity is recorded on another plaque on this building. The accurate plaque is round the corner from the inaccurate one. But it’s partly obscured by those trees, and my camera phone couldn’t do it justice.
A prototype railway station
I headed towards the site of Cottage Row. In 1825 the S&DR rented Cottage Row, a small terrace of houses next to the company’s Stockton coal staiths. It had already built a warehouse here in 1824 in anticipation of the forthcoming railway. The S&DR then opened the Mariner’s Tavern here in August 1826. So, by 1826 Stockton had two depots, including the landsale depot at St John’s Crossing. But Cottage Row was the terminus where the functions of a station started to evolve. A place to marshal coaches, a parcels facility, a warehouse for goods, railway offices, railway workers’ housing and The Mariner’s Tavern. By the time of the centenary of the S&DR in 1925, this entire site had fallen into dereliction, and nothing remains of it now.
You’ve come to the wrong place
By 1925, there was so little evidence of the former activity that the centenary celebrants mistakenly thought that the depot associated with the first years of passenger travel had been over at St John’s Crossing. The 1925 misinformation was corrected during the bicentenary of the S&DR in 2025. An information board was erected on the site of Cottage Row, the real site of the S&DR’s terminus and where the proto railway station had started to evolve. It’s now a World Origin Site. Here is the information board. The River Tees is just behind the camera.
Sculpture
I continued along the river, then cut up through Stockton Waterfront Park to the High Street. Here, a steel sculpture marks the location of the Black Lion Inn. Martha Howson of the Black Lion had a business partnership with Jane and Richard Scott of the King’s Head Hotel in Darlington to run passenger coaches on the S&DR. You can read more about Martha’s role as one of the leading women of the S&DR here. The sculpture commemorates coaches owned and operated by the business partners. Martha Howson owned “Defiance” and Richard Scott owned “Defence”. The coaches actually operated down at the other end of a long strip of land owned by the Black Lion Inn, next to the River Tees. The river is out of shot to the right of the photo.
Cramped site
Because it was a pioneering railway, the builders of the S&DR didn’t realize how much room railways would need. The terminus at Stockton was a single line, hemmed in between the river and land sloping up steeply to the High Street. There were frequent accidents as trains and coaches tried to pass each other. George Stephenson, who had built the railway, made a mental note not to repeat his mistake
Sandbanks
The coal staiths on the River Tees were plagued with shifting sandbanks, and the S&DR was sued by some shipping companies for the damage to their boats. The company soon realized that this wasn’t a great location. They scouted for a better one, and found a more favourable spot about three miles downstream, on the other side of the river. Just a ruined house, and a derelict priory with a handful of gravestones. The S&DR bought the site and built the world’s first planned railway town. As a corporate branding exercise, the S&DR directors called it Port Darlington, but nobody ever used that name. This place was, and is, Middlesbrough.
Other landsale depots
Caroline mentioned that Urlay Nook, near Eaglescliffe, had a landsale depot, but there’s no trace of it. However, the one at Fighting Cocks, near Middleton St George has survived. The Friends of the S&DR have just bought it and are renovating it
Darlington branch
The S&DR opened the short Darlington branch at the same time as the main railway. It terminated at a landsale depot In 1826 the railway company built a tavern across the road from the depot on High Northgate. This wasn’t a passenger facility, but an inn to cater for the depot employees and customers, using cash borrowed from Joseph Pease. Cash flow problems were a thing, even then. The inn was called the Railway Tavern and it’s still here.
Road block
Just further up High Northgate was a level crossing. This was the main line of the S&DR. This level crossing caused traffic problems on what is also The Great North Road. So, in 1856, the S&DR excavated a massive hole in the ground, raised the level of the railway, erected a bridge, and ran the main road under it. The bridge is still in situ, serving the Bishop Line.
Goods station
Immediately to the right of what was to become the bridge, the S&DR built a goods station in 1826/27. Items for transfer from rail to road had to be lifted up and down between railway and road with a crane. The remnants of the goods station, demolished in 1864, can still be seen.
Digging deep
The cumbersome crane activity to move goods soon got tiresome, and by 1833, the S&DR had built a single-storey replacement on the other side of Northgate. This is now the entrance to Hopetown Museum. It’s strange to think that, when the goods station was built, the land in front of it was level. The height of this staircase gives an indication of how much earth has been shifted here.
The former goods station was eventually converted into a passenger station in 1833. But, later on, that too was replaced with a new purpose built passenger station on the other side of Northgate, and it became North Road station.
Heighington
Finally Caroline Hardie moved on to the subject of Heighington, the world’s oldest railway station. Heighington opened in 1827 as a tavern next to the landsale depot which had been built there in 1825. From this inn the landlord Matthew Turnbull and his family ran the landsale depot, locomotives took on water, the parcels and delivery service thrived, business commuting took place from here and hospitality and refreshments were provided. The S&DR was on a steep learning curve after opening two years previously, and by a process of expediency, it had stumbled on a formula that would be repeated across the UK and overseas. Heighington station can reasonably claim to be the oldest railway station in the world, and it pioneered the job of the rural stationmaster.
The fall and rise of Heighington station
The S&DR station building was closed in the 1960s, and it fell into decline until it was reopened as a pub in the 1980s. It became known as the Locomotion No1 pub in 1996. That name is significant. It was here that Locomotion No1 was first put on the rails prior to the inaugural run of the S&DR in September 1825. Three years later, the engine exploded at the station, killing the driver. But the Locomotion No1 pub went out of business in 2017
You’ve got a friend
The nearby Hitachi Company donated £250,000 to the Friends of the S&DR, allowing the friends to buy the former pub. They have started renovating the building, and hope to restore it to how it looked in 1827. Hitachi deliberately chose this location for their train company, knowing that some of the most modern rolling stock in the world would run on one of the oldest railways. The Friends of the S&DR intend to paint all of the stations on this line to a uniform livery being devised by local apprentices.
That’s all you’re getting
The talk came to a close. Caroline Hardie is a Trustee of the Friends of the S&DR. The Friends continue to be responsible for managing the legacy of this famous railway. The work at Heighington is just one example. After the talk, I decided to sample another one. Just north of the town centre, part of the Pease House at 138-148 Northgate is finally being renovated, after years of dereliction. The Friends of the S&DR has teamed up with Darlington Borough Council, and they’re hoping to get Heritage Lottery funding for the project. That kebab shop has got to go, I reckon.
Darlington is unique
This is Darlington’s unique selling point: Come for a talk by Caroline Hardie MA, MCIfA, IHBC on the S&DR, then take a 10-minute walk up Northgate and see the real thing.
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