When Robert Stephenson and Co’s Locomotion No 1 arrived in Stockton on 27 September 1825, the first rail vehicle ever to transport passengers, it was met by a seven-gun salute and a crowd bowled over by the spectacle. “It was found to be quite impossible to restrain the enthusiasm of the multitude,” reported a mildly concerned Durham County Observer journalist.
This weekend the celebrations are likely to be slightly less wild, as the bicentenary of the pioneering Stockton and Darlington railway line (S&DR) is marked. But they will undoubtedly be heartfelt. A replica of the pioneering engine is to recreate the inaugural journey, with viewing tickets sold out along the route and a big screen following its progress in Darlington’s town centre. A set of commemorative stamps is being issued, which feels appropriately old school. And coming in on time, the National Railway Museum in York – a magnet for visitors from the day it opened in 1975 – is reopening after a multimillion-pound refurbishment.
The businessmen who invested in the S&DR were motivated by the functional benefits of transporting coal more efficiently from Durham’s collieries. But their enterprise eventually unlocked far wider human possibilities, transforming perceptions of distance and changing the way the nation lived. Trains carried Victorian working-class families to the seaside and back, and reunited lovers on windswept platforms. Packed 20th-century commuter trains shuttled between satellite towns and cities. A railway station became part of the identity of a place, as well as a point of departure from it.
These days the railways are journeying with difficulty towards a new era. The short-sighted Beeching cuts of the 1960s, and the needless, botched privatisation of the 1990s, were unforced political errors whose legacy is still felt today. Prohibitive fares, fragmentation, and chronic mismanagement in the north, where the story began, blight the contemporary network. HS2 remains a staggeringly expensive fiasco.
As the government gradually takes more train operators back under public ownership, a much-needed strategic reboot is required. The rail industry should become a crucial driver of green sustainable growth. Sadly, reports that plans to extend high-speed rail across the north of England are yet again to be delayed do not inspire confidence.
For train lovers though, this weekend is about the past not the future. Locomotion No 1 launched a journey which was about far more than travelling from A to B. From E Nesbit’s evocation of a rural Edwardian childhood in The Railway Children, to WH Auden’s poem, Night Mail, the trip has left its mark on our literature. Flanders and Swann memorialised lines lost to Beeching in song. Carnforth in Lancashire still celebrates its station’s role in the cinema classic Brief Encounter, where a doomed romance is brought to a close by a guard’s whistle, and the rhythmic sound of wheels beginning to move on track.
Just north of Carnforth one of Britain’s great train routes begins, as the curve of Morecambe Bay permits spectacular views of vast sands and, further away, the Lakeland fells. It would be fatuous to try to name the UK’s most beautiful railway line, but there are many to choose from. Passengers (not customers) can watch the show, read a book or fire up their laptop, enjoying the freedom of being between places. The cheering Stockton crowds of 1825 were right to think they had seen the future, and that it worked.
Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here.
