Seeking railway relics in the wildest of Durham countryside

Recent Memories have told of how when the Stockton & Darlington Railway opened in 1825, its rails were laid on two lines of stone sleepers. This enabled horses to gallop between the lines pulling the wagons without tripping over.

But these blocks, with two or four holes drilled into them, became redundant within 15 years as the locomotive triumphed over the horse and the railwaymen preferred a single sleeper to keep the rails at exactly the correct distance apart.

The stone blocks, quarried at Brusselton near Shildon, were surplus to requirements and used for all manner of building projects. They also raise many questions about how, in the days before Rawplugs, you attached rails to them, and why did those rails have “fish bellies”?

And, judging by our inbox, these railway relics still intrigue a lot of people…

Fish bellied rails and stone sleepers: the S&DR was built in this way, but when George Stephenson built the Liverpool & Manchester Railway five years later, he seems to have rotated the sleepers by 45 degrees so it looks as if the rails are laid on two lines of diamonds

TOWAN HANCOCK in Shincliffe is investigating the Durham & Sunderland Railway which was built in the late 1830s. It ran from Shincliffe east to Murton and then went north to a station at Sunderland Town Moor, collecting coal from collieries as it went. The coal was shipped from Sunderland docks.

Because the terrain was quite hilly, the D&S didn’t use steam locomotives until 1857. Instead, it had stationery winding engines which hauled the wagons along using a rope.

Just like on the early Stockton & Darlington Railway, its rails were placed in metal “chairs” which were nailed onto square stone sleeper blocks. The sleepers were drilled in the quarry with either two holes or four holes for the nails to go in.

Towan says: “When the D&S started from Sunderland in 1834, it advertised for materials, including: “60,000 oak pins, 5ins long X 1 & ⅛th ins at the top and ⅞ths ins square at the bottom for chairs.””

We reckon that the square oak pins were driven into the round holes. A metal spike, or nail, was then driven through the chair into the wood to hold everything tightly together.

“I have found a four hole block (above) associated with the junction between the D&S and the Whitwell Colliery waggonway, near Sherburn Hospital,” says Towan.

“I’ve also found a piece of fish-bellied rail with the chair still attached on the Whitwell wagonway (above). The rail ends half way through the chair. It looks as if the next rail would have been butted up to it in the other half of the chair and all fixed to a two hole block.

“Could it be that four holed blocks were used for two chairs with the rails butting up against each other?

“Hopefully an expert can cast some light on the techniques used.”

The rails in Darlington's South Park, which purport to come from the original trackbed of the S&DR, are not fish bellied so they can't be originals

TOWAN has moved us onto rails. A traditional straight length of rail with its ends supported on stone blocks was weakest in the middle. To give it greater strength, it was given greater depth in the middle. This gave the underside of the rail the curved shape of a fish belly.

When building the S&DR, George Stephenson insisted that malleable, or wrought, iron should be used for the rails rather than brittle cast iron. Malleable iron was a relatively new discovery. To make it, you reheat your cast iron to greater temperatures and then roll it and it becomes much more durable.

This was a brave recommendation by Stephenson, as he was a partner in the Walker Ironworks in Newcastle which made cast iron rails. His partner, William Losh, was so annoyed at Stephenson advocating the new technology and so talking the ironworks out of a lucrative contract, he ended their long friendship.

The malleable rails were made in Bedlington on Tyneside, and came in 12ft to 15ft lengths.

The S&DR was one of the first railways to use malleable rails, and the new reliability of the iron is one of the reasons that railways spread so quickly after 1825.

Some original fish bellied rails from the S&DR used to be on display on the side of a railway building in Park Lane, near Darlington Bank Top's station. This picture was taken in 1971 by John Boyes

SO the first sleepers on the S&DR were two holed. They were replaced by the larger four holes in the early 1830s as trains got heavier. However, because the two separate lines of sleepers tended to splay apart, by 1840 single wooden sleepers holding both tracks were in place.

This meant there were tens of thousands of redundant stone blocks. As we’ve seen recently, many of them were built into the seawall at Saltburn.

Dave Middlemas and Ray Jackson have also drawn our attention to the use of the blocks on the Waskerley Way in north-west Durham.

“There is a particularly good display of them in the form of a long wall north of Robert Stephenson’s 1834 Stanhope and Tyne Railway line west of Waskerley,” says Dave. “I suppose it made sense to carry them only a few feet and build them into a useful snow wall north of the trackbed.”

Dave Middlemas' picture of the snow wall made of stone sleepers on the Waskerley Way. His wife, Alison, who we last saw a year ago investigating the remains of a Second World War tank on Cotherstone moor, is clearly enjoying her day out

Waskerley is one of the most wonderfully windblown parts of the world, and in the days of proper winters, snow must have been a major hazard.

The snow wall to the north of the Stanhope & Tyne trackbed on the Waskerley Way. Picture: Ray Jackson

Snowploughs at Waskerley ready for anything the elements could throw at them

The Stanhope & Tyne Railway was built to carry stone from the quarries of Stanhope and coal from the mines near Consett 38 miles to the coast at South Shields. It negotiated some of the steepest gradients in the county by using stationery engines and then locomotives took over on the flat. Indeed, so severe were the gradients that on opening day, May 15, 1834, a train ran back down the Weatherhill Incline and crashed into a siding, killing a man and a boy.

After such an inauspicious start, the railway was not a financial success. It went bankrupt in 1841. A successor company struggled until in 1845, when the Stockton & Darlington Railway expanded north from Bishop Auckland to Crook and Tow Law to meet the old line near Waskerley.

Ray Jackson points out that every 80 yards or so, there are S&DR wayposts (above), like small headstones. These must have been installed between 1845 and 1863 when the North Eastern Railway took over.

In the late Victorian heyday of mineral consumption, the line turned a profit despite its inhospitable terrain.

In its railway heyday, there was a community at Waskerley which had three streets and 250 residents, but it was abandoned in the 1950s when the line closed

The 20th Century, though, was not so kind to it, and parts of it started to close from 1951 until 1980. Now the western 10 miles of the trackbed is the Waskerley Way, a footpath and cycleway.

Ray is also intrigued by the 10ft high security fence which can be seen from some parts of the path. “It encloses quite an extensive area,” he says.

The security fence near the Waskerley Way which is a leftover from when Saltersgate was a munitions depot. Picture: Ray Jackson

This is the Saltersgate Munitions Depot, constructed by the Government in 1939. It was where munitions made at Aycliffe by the Angels were stored. The shells were taken up the line to a new station, Blackhill, where they were collected by a little tramway which moved them onto the site.

They were stored in large concrete bunkers which to this day are surrounded by massive earthern, anti-blast berms.

The depot closed in 1969. Very little has been written about it. We’d love to know more about its history and what is kept there now. Please email chris.lloyd@nne.co.uk if you have any snippets…

READ MORE: THE STONE SLEEPERS AND THE CREATION OF SALTBURN

READ EVEN MORE: WAS SALTBURN'S FIRST CLIFF LIFT BUILT TO CARRY STONE SLEEPERS DOWN TO THE PROM?