Last month we were celebrating one of the ways our area changed the way people live across the globe. Two hundred years ago, on 26th September 1825, the world’s first passenger locomotive, Locomotion Number 1, was put on the tracks outside the world’s first passenger train station – Aycliffe Lane, now Heighington station. The following day it made it’s first journey along the newly created Stockton & Darlington Railway.
This was the first steam powered passenger train journey, which marked the birth of public rail travel as we know it. Passenger railways went on to change the way we live, work, travel and transformed industry.
When Locomotion Number 1 came to life for that first journey, steam hauled passenger railways began and passenger rail was born. Over 450 passengers in converted coal wagons passed through Aycliffe, then Darlington, where the train was greeted by 10,000 people, before reaching the outskirts of Stockton at around half three in the afternoon.
It’s a day that we can all share real pride in. All modern railways across the globe trace their beginnings back to that first journey. Our area genuinely changed the world that day.
Public railways meant working people could travel long distances for work and leisure. It led to the creation of the first passenger railway carriage, railway pubs, signalling systems, railway bridges and train station waiting rooms. In fact, it even changed the way we tell the time. Before the railways, different areas of the country had their own local time zones. But, with passenger trains now travelling at speed between regions, a country-wide standardised time zone had to be created, so that train timetables could work.
We should be incredibly proud that this revolutionary day could only have happened here, in our community. Only here did we have the perfect mix of coal in the ground to power the engines, world-leading engineers like George Stephenson and his son Robert from Newcastle and local entrepreneurs from the Pease family who took the risk of investing in all this new technology. County Durham’s innovation and ingenuity changed travel and society forever.
I’m just as optimistic about the role we can play in the future of the railways. After three years of campaigning, I worked with Labour ministers to help secure over £800 million of contracts to safeguard Hitachi Rail in Newton Aycliffe, protecting jobs and skills in our town. Thanks to this, our community continues to build the latest high-tech trains and shape modern rail travel. It was a privilege to welcome the Transport Secretary, Rail Minister and the Japanese Ambassador at the factory to mark the 200th anniversary of passenger rail. And it was fantastic to work with the Friends of the Stockton & Darlington Railway to help them raise the final piece of funding needed to restore the decaying Heighington station.
It’s been great that we’ve been celebrating this huge 200th anniversary across the country with the Railway 200 campaign. For the anniversary, the Locomotion museum in Shildon has been expanded and the former North Road Railway Museum completely revamped and re-opened as ‘Hopetown’. Give them a visit to learn more about our fantastic railway heritage, if you haven’t been yet.
We can all be proud that our area was at the heart of the rail revolution – and we are all a part of that incredible story.