Celebrations planned for 200th birthday of world’s ‘first successful steam railway’ in autumn 2022
A MAJOR event to mark the bicentenary of the Hetton Colliery Railway (HCR) is being planned for late 2022.
The eight-mile line which was opened in 1822 by the Hetton Coal Company at Hetton Lyons in County Durham, was the first in the world to operate without the use of animal power.
It was also the first completelynew railway to be developed by George Stephenson, pre-dating the Stockton & Darlington Railway (SDR) by three years.
It was built to his standard gauge of 4ft 8in, which has been used for the waggonways at Killingworth and Wallsend, with an extra half-inch added to facilitate free movement to reduce binding on curves on the Liverpool & Manchester Railway and lines thereafter.
George's brother Robert was the resident engineer who oversaw its day-to-day construction.
Running between Hetton Colliery and a staithe on the River Wear at Sunderland, it was the oldest mineral railway in the UK when it closed in 1959.
The colliery itself is also historically significant because it used groundbreaking technology to successfully sink a pit shaft through permeable limestone for the first time, and was also a for runner of the joint stock companies which dominated the railway age in early Victorian Britain.
A locally-based HCR200 committee has been set up to plan the bicentenary event. Its spokesman Vic Branfoot said: “The HCR committee accepts that the HCR lacks the charisma of the SDR, which opened in 1825. The SDR was the world's first successful passenger railway. However, in technical terms, the HCR and not the SDR was the world's first successful railway.”
In advance of announcing concrete plans for next year's big event, the committee has produced a booklet, Hetton Coal Company bicentenary, which outlines the history of the mine and the myth surrounding the line's famous surviving locomotive.
As highlighted in issue 270, experts who carried out a forensic-like examination of the 0-4-0 Lyon and its tender alongside detailed archival research, found that it was not built by Stephenson as long believed, but was one of three sisters built at the colliery in 1849, to an unusually antiquated design for the times with vertical cylinders, set into the boiler crown, and a vertical motion – and is therefore far from being one of the oldest in the world. It had been named Lyon after John Lyon under whose land, Hetton Colliery won much of its coal.
However, erroneous press claims made in 1902 about its vintage led to Lyon being preserved when withdrawn from service in 1912. Watched by more than 100,000 people, Lyon led the 1925 SDR centenary cavalcade after the LNER restored it at Darlington North Road.
The HCR system passed to the National Coal Board at nationalisation in 1947, and was closed on September 12, 1959. Several stretches of the trackbed have been converted to form the Stephenson Trail walking and cycle route.