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
The railway earned a special place in history as the first to be designed for steam locomotives only.
1822
King George IV 1820-1830
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.
Suggest answers to this question. See if you can limit one answer to exactly seven words.
Why did the colliery need a railway?
Express the ideas below in a single sentence, using different words as much as possible. Do not be satisfied with the first answer you think of; think of several, and choose the best.
The River Wear enters the North Sea at Sunderland. The Hetton railway took coal to Sunderland. Ships took the coal to London.