Middleton Railway, Leeds: The Oldest Railway in the World

Middleton Railway was built 250 years ago this year to move coal specifically from the coal pits down the line down to the river in the centre of Leeds. In the 1750s the mines were taken over by the Brandlings and they turned mining into a serious business where they were supplying Leeds with coal. This was the start of the Industrial Revolution and there were already steam engines in the mills etc and these were requiring more and more coal to power them and also people were coming to live in the towns and they were requiring more and more coal so there was huge demand on these pits to dig the coal out and get it to where it was wanted in the then town of Leeds as quickly as possible in as big a quantity as possible. Prior to the railway being built it would be moved on donkeys, mules and just in bags in small quantities. The idea was to build a wagon way which was the forerunner to the railway and the idea was that they would build carts like small wagons with wheels on and these will be pulled on a wooden wagon way into the centre of Leeds. The big problem they had was that a number of people owned the land between the pits on the river in the centre of Leeds so to overcome this Brandling went to the Houses of Parliament and asked for an Act of Parliament to allow him to cross this privately owned land and this is where we got the first ever Act of Parliament to build the railway. I mean we do not claim to be the very first wagon way in the world, there were others around and about. We claim to be the first railway to have an Act of Parliament to build the railway. When Brandling asked for his first Act of Parliament he actually named in the Act of Parliament the price of the coal. In those days it was measured in corfs and it was so many pence per corf for sale on the dockside on the the river. What he was finding was that his costs were ever increasing and he was finding it more and more difficult to produce the coal and sell it on the riverside at a profit sticking to the price that he'd named in the Act of Parliament and he did actually eventually have to go back to Parliament and ask for an increase in the price. To enable costs to be kept down the actual horse had to be removed out of the equation and the only way he could remove the horse out of the equation was to build a steam locomotive to replace the horse and this is exactly what they did in Leeds. They went to a young engineer called Matthew Murray and he was working in conjunction with somebody else called Fenton and they produced a batch of four steam locomotives which they sold to Brandling to work on the Colliery Railway. One blew up pretty quickly and the other three went on. In the next few years two more blew up but one called Salamanca was known to work for a good number of years. We're not quite sure of the fate of that engine. We think it was eventually scrapped rather than blowing up. They could only manufacture cast iron rails and cast iron rails were not very strong so they had to keep the weight of the locomotive down so it was as light as it possibly could be. The lightweight locomotive was fine for the brittle cast iron rails but it had no traction. Because it had very little traction it couldn't pull. So he had this brilliant idea of a rack and pinion and on the side of the locomotive the drive was a huge great cog wheel which interacted with cogs that he laid on the side of the rails and by doing this which he did successfully patent he was able to pull quite large loads with a very small locomotive. Now these were the first four steam locomotives that were built to work and actually worked in a commercial environment and earned their keep. So I think this railway can be said to be responsible for the steam locomotive industry in Leeds which went on course to be steam and diesel locomotives produced in Leeds. But Leeds produced more locomotives than any other town or city in England. The line came to an end as a coal transporting line in around 1960s when you know the National Coal Board was going around shutting the smaller pits down because they just weren't economic to keep going and the line was closed to transport coal slightly before the actual pit closed and the last few years the pit was serviced by road. But the railway remained here and it was a group of railway enthusiasts from Leeds University, the Leeds University Transport Society who saw the opportunity to run this railway as a working railway and they negotiated and got possession of the line, they didn't actually buy it, it's very complicated how they came about it but they had permission to run trains on the track and various companies around about assisted them in giving them siding space and they ran a daily freight service for I don't know 12 or 15 years bringing raw materials, sheet steel, steel girders from the goods yard down in Hunslet to the stockyards of these manufacturing companies and often they would then take out the finished products by rail. When British Railways started to change the way they handled freight these small one-off loads were encouraged to be road transported rather than rail transported and this industry slowly declined. I think the finishing school came when the motorway was built and so much of this industry was just annihilated to make way for the motorway that all the business of the railway stopped and then it was decided that maybe it could be turned into a tourist line instead. 38 years ago Trust was formed. We have a hard core of 30-ish volunteers who come on a regular basis. Some like to work on the engineering side where you can get nice and black and others prefer this side, the white collar environment and then we've got those who go between the two so we know we can cater for all sorts of people. Oh there's always work to be done I mean we could work here eight days a week. In some respects it's like having a giant toy box you know which toy should we play with today but you know seriously there is an awful lot of work and some of these locomotives that you see in here have been restored and to restore a steam locomotive or do a 10-year overhaul on one which we often do here you're talking about three years hard work on a locomotive. When we renovate anything we try and do it with the same skills that we used 200 years ago or hand riveting this sort of thing and it gives you an idea of the hard graft that went into building railways in the early days. We're open to the public every weekend from Easter and during August we open to the public and run trains on Wednesday. The rest of the time if we are open it's because somebody's here but we're not officially open to the public. The trains only run weekends. Diesel on a Saturday, steam on a Sunday as a rule.