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Weardale's wheel turns full circle

Old King Coal was the primary reason why the North East became the cradle of the world’s railways. Among several other factors, the shortage of horses caused by the incessant demands of the British Army during the Napoleonic wars led to colliery owners revisiting Cornish mining engineer Richard Trevithick’s steam engine designs.

The railways facilitated the large-scale industrialisation of the region and many others.

Now coal is set to finance regular passenger services on one of the one-time ‘lost’ railways of County Durham – the Weardale branch.

On 22 May, the Weardale Railway will officially launch its new timetable of seven-days-a-week public – as opposed to heritage – services over the 15½ miles of line from Stanhope to Bishop Auckland.

The plan is to run seven round trips a day, dovetailing in with Northern Rail services on Network Rail’s Darlington-Bishop Auckland branch. Future expansion plans including running all the way from Eastgate, the current terminus of the 18½-mile former North Eastern Railway branch, through to Darlington, taking in Locomotion: The National Railway Museum at Shildon. There is also a scheme to build a rail freight terminal at Eastgate for the loading of aggregates from local quarries together with other freight, such as food and agricultural commodities.

Heritage steam services, handled by RSH 0-6-0T No 7765 of 1954 No 40, will run at weekends, high days and holidays.

British American Railway Services, a subsidiary of US private company Iowa Pacific Holdings, which acquired a 75 per cent holding in the Weardale Railway from previous operator Ealing Community Transport in 2008, has sunk £1.5-million into bringing the line up to scratch, allowing services to be expanded from the previous Stanhope-Wolsingham round trips.

However, BARS is under no false illusion that community rail will pay its way, and neither will the addition of heritage steam be sufficient to make the line viable.

Heavy freight is seen as the answer. The running of regular coal trains, maybe boosted at a later date by stone, sand and gravel traffic, is the cornerstone of the business plan.

Under the BARS masterplan, the revenue from freight will subsidise the passenger trains, which will be developed as the opportunity permits, the jewel in the crown being a separate scheme to develop a ‘hot rocks’ eco village at Eastgate as a major ‘green’ tourist attraction.

The passenger services, using one of the railway’s two Class 141 two-car DMUs, with a Class 73 on hand with locomotive-hauled stock as a back-up, are set to commence on 23 May.

The green benefits

And if all goes to plan, and planning permission is obtained, the first coal trains could be running in June or July.

The coal traffic plans has left opinion in the dale divided. The scheme centres around the use of the former Wolsingham steelworks site, currently being demolished apart from the listed gun barrel works which has 17th-century origins, as a loading depot handling coal extracted from a new UK Coal site near Sunniside. From Wolsingham, the coal will be taken over the next four years to Drax power station in Yorkshire.

Nearly 500 Wolsingham residents wrote to Durham County Council objecting to the depot. They claimed that the planned depot will be polluting, noisy, dirty and present a road traffic hazard.

However, the protestors were outnumbered by 1281 letters of support for the depot which were submitted by people in Toft Hill, Fir Tree and West Auckland, who want to keep coal lorries off the A68.

UK Coal will also save large amounts of money by switching to rail.

As we closed for press, BARS spokesman Mark Westerfield told Heritage Railway that he was '95 per cent' certain that the county council will back the railway’s plan.

“We also have our eye on some stone traffic as well,” he said. “The coal traffic will fund community transport which will benefit everyone in the dale.”

The railway’s expansion has already created jobs in what had for long been a depressed area since the collapse of local industry.

In March, 18 young people signed up for part-time jobs as part of the new community rail service. Recruits were chosen at a jobs fair in Wolsingham Town Hall and employed through a Future Jobs Fund initiative targeting young people and the long-term unemployed. Many said their attempts to find work had been hampered by their lack of workplace experience.

Mark Westerfield said: "Having this many willing workers will enable us to go a long way towards the revival of the Weardale Railway.

“At present, there is a tremendous revival of railways both in the USA and in Britain and we believe this line has superb potential.”

He added that it was hoped to bring more steam locomotives to the railway as it developed.

At present, signalling arrangements mean that Weardale trains cannot run into the station at Bishop Auckland, so the railway is building its own half on land 200 yards away as a temporary measure.

Revival first time around

Mark said it was also hoped to open a new station at Witton-le-Wear to the east of the current level crossing by the end of the year.

The branch to Wearhead and its rich mineral deposits was originally proposed by the Stockton & Darlington Railway in 1822. In the event, it was built in four stages over a 50-year period, beginning with the opening of the line from Shildon to Bishop Auckland, Witton Park and Crook in 1843.

Another line was built from Wear Valley Junction north of Witton Park to Wolsingham and Frosterley in 1847, and extended to Stanhope in 1862. The final section from Stanhope to Wearhead opened in 1895.

It had been planned to extend the line from Wearhead to join the NER’s Alston branch (part of which is now the 2ft gauge South Tynedale Railway) but this never came to fruition.

Passenger services were withdrawn as early as 29 June 1953, when there were still about five daily trains each way making the hour-long journey from Wear Valley Junction to Wearhead.

The westernmost section from St John’s Chapel to Wearhead closed in 1961, followed by the Westgate to St John’s Chapel section in 1965 and the Eastgate cement works to Westgate section in 1968. Mark Westerfield said it was unlikely that these six miles will be rebuilt.

In March 1993, owner Lafarge decided to service the Eastgate cement works by road and end its use of rail. Subsequently, British Rail announced its intention to close the line following the loss of the what was the line's last significant commercial customer. Local councils sought to find some alternative use for the branch heritage line.

With the branch available, a revivalist company, Weardale Railways Ltd, was set up the same year. In its formative years, illustrious names on its board included Sir William McAlpine, Pete Waterman, Ian Allan and David Bellamy, although most of them pulled out before it was able to start services.

The Weardale Railway Trust was formed as a voluntary group to support the company.

In the early 21st century, sizeable amounts of public sector grant aid were obtained from sources including local regional development agency One North East, Durham County Council and Wear Valley District Council. The Manpower Services Commission helped pay staff, and a 40-strong workforce was recruited.

As highlighted in Heritage Railway issue 65, heritage era public services started on 17 July 2004, using NER P3 0-6-0 No 2392 and the Tanfield Railway’s Austerity 0-6-0ST No 49, topping and tailing between Wolsingham and Stanhope.

Within six months, however, it all came to grief. The project was run by a private company and relied heavily on paid staff rather than volunteers, and the initial operation was not sustainable from income.

Within a few months, trading losses of around £500,000 were incurred and the railway ran up debts of more than £1-million. Weardale Railways Ltd went into administration on 2 January 2005, with 36 staff laid off.

In the ensuing months, several attempts were made to get the railway out of administration, but there were too many hurdles, not least of all the construction in 2004 of a new running shed at the Wolsingham depot site on land that did not belong to the railway, and which a dispute with a nearby factory led to access being blocked. Despite the administration, the railway received the Ian Allan Award for the best station restoration project of 2006 for Stanhope station.

Eventually, Ealing Community Transport, a London-based community interest company, decided to dabble in railways and acquired a 75 per cent stake in Weardale Railways Ltd for £100,000, as well as a controlling interest in the Dartmoor Railway at Okehampton.

The railway’s creditors agreed to a company voluntary arrangement whereby they would receive 22p for every £1 they were owed. The railway company was restructured and renamed as the Weardale Railways Community Interest Company. A year later, however, ECT decided to dispose of its railway division on economic grounds. During 2007, a full year of normal operations, the Weardale Railway had attracted only 10,000 passengers as opposed to a break-even figure of 35,000, with trading running at £10,000 per month.

The saviour this time round was BARS, who acquired ECT’s holding, with the Weardale Railway Trust and Durham County Council each having a 12½ per cent stake.

Steaming ahead

In a great transatlantic push, paid staff and volunteers joined forces to a massive vegetation clearance exercise between Wolsingham and Bishop Auckland.

In early 2009 a Wickham trolley ran over the cleared line, and in September that year, Network Rail reconnected the branch to the main line.

On 19 February this year, a King's Cross to Stanhope charter operated by UK Railtours, became the first main line passenger service to travel the line since the 1980s. Headed by Class 67

No 67029, it hauled Riviera Trains’ ‘Royal Scot’ set of Mk1 carmine and cream coaches. It was followed on 27 February by a charter from Crewe to Stanhope, operated by Spitfire Railtours, and again underlining the railway’s potential for bringing visitors into the dale.

As we highlighted in our last issue, no less than LMS Jubilee 4-6-0 No 5690 Leander has been booked to head a Railway Touring Company special from Newcastle-upon-Tyne to Stanhope on 16 October.

At Darlington, a new G5 0-4-4T – typical of the extinct NER class that worked over many Durham branch lines like Weardale – is taking shape at the premises of Great Northern Steam, and is now expected to cost £850,00, including main line registration. Its support coach is ready and waiting – at Wolsingham – and it is intended that the new locomotive will be a regular performer on the Weardale Railway. There is indeed immense tourist potential here. The atmospheric villages of Stanhope, Frosterley and Wolsingham are in their own way every bit as delightful as their counterparts on the Keighley & Worth Valley and North Yorkshire Moors railways, and are just crying out to be ‘discovered’ by the charter market. Much of the scenery in the valley, including the River Wear itself, is superb. Also, most of the stations lie in the heart of the villages, not several miles away from them.

Locomotion is a splendid facility, but how much better it would be if it could offer a live steam service too. The Severn Valley Railway thrives on the doorstep of the West Midlands conurbation: the Weardale Railway should be the Tyneside equivalent. Much has been said and done about reviving the branch over the past 17 years, but the American owners have taken the project much further.

The coal scheme will bring an overall big environmental gain to the region: I suspect most if not all readers might share my view that such traffic should always go by rail where it is an option. A sound and developable business case has been drawn up, and the new Weardale Railway operation surely deserves our full support.

If it succeeds, who knows what other doors that its example might open elsewhere in Britain?