“THE still, quaint village of Barton has seldom had its monotonous career varied by sound more joyous and jubilant than awoke its echoes on Wednesday last and the opening of the Merrybent & Darlington Railway is not likely soon to be forgotten by those living in the district which will form the sphere of its labours,” began the Darlington & Stockton Times of 150 years ago this week.
The Merrybent & Darlington Railway is now forgotten. It has been obliterated from the face of the landscape to the west of Darlington.
But it should be remembered, at least for two quirky reasons.
Firstly, its only station at Barton is believed to be the only passenger station on the entire railway network which was never visited by a fare-paying passenger and never issued a passenger ticket.
And secondly, the railway is believed to have been the first in the country to become a motorway: the A1(M) from Scotch Corner to Junction 58 at Burtree follows much of its course.
For all the opening celebrations 150 years ago, the railway had a painful birth.
Robert Henry Allan of Blackwell Grange, the lord of the Barton manor over whose land the railway ran, was being optimistic when he said at the celebrations: “The rapid formation of the railway at a comparatively moderate cost, during a most unpropitious season, over a somewhat difficult country and emphatically across the ‘thundering Tees’ is above all praise.”
The six-and-a-half mile line was planned in the early 1860s to run from the Darlington & Barnard Castle line at the end of what is now Jedburgh Drive on the Branksome outskirts of Darlington. It would have a coal depot where it went over the A67 Darlington to Barnard Castle road (the straggly village of Merrybent now occupies this site), and then it would cross the thunderous Tees between Low Coniscliffe and Cleasby.
Then it would head south towards a seam of limestone between Barton and Scotch Corner, and there were hopes that it would extend towards Middleton Tyas where there were copper mines.
But almost as soon as construction began in the mid 1860s, the railway ran into difficulties. The line began to subside and Colonel John Wilson, of Cliffe Hall, won substantial damages because it ran close to his estate. In 1868, the principal promoter of the line, Joseph Boyer of Barton Lodge, resigned.
Without him, its future was in great jeopardy, but into the breach stepped Henry King Spark.
Mr Spark was a maverick. He had fluked a fortune on a coal deal, bought the Greenbank estate in Darlington and a couple of collieries at Tow Law, and was trying to create a powerbase to challenge the ubiquitous Pease family. A railway fitted snugly into his portfolio, and he used his newspaper – the Darlington & Stockton Times – to promote it.
In those days, the D&S Times was a deadly rival to The Northern Echo (today, of course, they are the best of friends). When the line opened on June 1, 1870, the D&S enthused enormously about it while the Echo could not bring itself to even print the name of its rival’s proprietor – the following day, it huffily printed a correction, without apology, for missing him out.
On opening day, Mr Spark and 200 VIPs – including A Schanschieff, engineer to the Imperial Government of Russia – left Darlington's North Road Station at 11am, hauled by a new engine, the Merrybent.
It was a 24-ton 0-6-0 engine which had been built by Messrs Hopper, Radcliffe & Company at the Britannia Foundry at Fencehouses, and it was soon joined by a second saddle tank engine called Barton.
As the train turned off the Barnard Castle line at Branksome, it entered “a lovely pastoral landscape”, according to the D&S.
“A glimpse of the village of Coniscliffe in the distance, slightly obscured here and there by the luxuriant foliage of the woods, a miniature of Cleasby to the right, and the Tees winding briskly between them with a graceful curve, all this heightened by hedgerows bedecked with the white-blossomed sloe and bright green fields looking freshened and revived by the passing shower which had been followed by brilliant sunshine, made up a picture which on canvas would have been acknowledged as charming,” said the weekly paper, breathlessly.
The train stopped at the Tees so that the passengers could inspect the "beautiful bridge", with interesting lattice sides, built by Messrs Hopkins, Gilkes and Company of Middlesbrough. It had three 75ft spans, and its foundations were sunk 30ft beneath the bed of the river "by means of pneumatic apparatus" so that it could be secured to solid rock.
Watching the passengers struggle back up the riverbank to regain the train, the Echo, which was still in a dark mood, noted in a long Latin sentence that it was easy to descend into hell but much harder to work one’s way out again.
The passengers reached their seats and the inaugural train carried on to Barton station where the line ended. The opening day was a month behind schedule, and the line was one-and-a-half miles short of the quarries, so the poor things had to walk to admire the workings.
Then they dragged their weary bodies back to the station where they were treated to a luncheon in a marquee in a field beside the station. There was much speechifying and toasting - and, indeed, boasting.
Mr Spark said there was 2,000 acres of land to be mined, owned by the wealthiest people in the area: as well as Mr Allan, the Duchess of Northumberland from Stanwick Hall owned land as did the Hartley family of Middleton Tyas.
Merrybent, prophesised Mr Spark, would soon overtake Weardale as the main supplier of limestone for flux to the voracious blast furnaces of Middlesbrough. Plus, he said, there was copper, lead and freestone (building stone) for the line to transport. Barton's 500 population, he predicted, would soon grow to 5,000 or 6,000 and they would all, he concluded, be very, very rich.
After the speechifying, the local young people competed in "old English sports" on a field: flat races, wrestling, running high leap, quoits, sackrace and, for the navvies, a wheelbarrow race (prizes donated by Mr Allan).
In Barton, Mr Boyer celebrated the arrival of the railway by treating 100 aged women and children to tea and refreshments in the school.
At the end of the opening day, the little engine pulled the VIPs back to Darlington from Barton station.
The station had cost £521 17s 9d. It was designed to accommodate passengers, yet only on this opening day did passengers ever alight on its platform.
The line itself had cost £80,000 to build, yet within five years of this opening day both it and Mr Spark were bankrupt.
Mr Boyer filed the petition to wind the railway up, and Mr Allan swapped sides to support him. The Darlington and District Joint Stock Bank, the principal creditor, seized possession of it, and it took 14 years to untangle its debts.
In 1890, the North Eastern Railway took over, using its own engines to run two goods trains a day to the quarries where, in 1896, the Barton Limestone Company restarted limestone extraction. In 1900, in the days before motor buses, Darlington Town Council asked NER if it might run passenger trains to Barton but the railway company said it would be too expensive to bring the line up to the required safety standard.
Still, it was a viable business. Just. The furnaces of Teesside, where the lime was used for fluxing iron ore, were as voracious as ever, but the quarry was a very primitive – the quarrymen had to hammer iron bars into the rock until it broke off – and so output never reached the dizzying heights predicted by Mr Spark.
But at least it was a viable business, and there was a need for more workmen. Not quite the thousands that Mr Spark had prophesised, but enough for Merrybent Cottages (a terrace where a highways depot is today), Waterfall Terrace and Jubilee Terrace in Barton to be built to accommodate them.
There may even have been a third engine, named Melsonby. There may have been a third called Barton.
The First World War probably saw the line and the quarry at their busiest, and their life was extended by the outbreak of the Second World War.
With peace, though, there was no need for the quarry's minerals and it closed.
With the quarry closed, there was no need for the line, and it closed on July 1, 1950. With the line closed, there was no need for the station which had never received a fare-paying passenger. It was demolished, and then in 1952, the Tees bridge was destroyed by fire and pulled down.
As the Merrybent & Darlington Railway faded from view, another transport age was beginning: the first stretch of motorway was built at Preston in 1958 followed by the M1 in 1959. The Ministry of Transport had been considering how it might bypass Barton, Stapleton and Darlington, which were all on the old A1, since 1938, and in the early 1960s, it hit upon the idea of the new A1(M) following the trackbed of the abandoned railway.
Between 1963 and 1965, six miles of the line were converted into motorway. The average railway trackbed was 12ft wide whereas the six lane motorway needed a bed at least 102ft wide, and so just about all signs of the quirky Merrybent & Darlington Railway were wiped from the face of the earth.
But at least the quarries it left behind were big enough to accommodate a motorway interchange, and so vehicles using Junction 56 drop off the A1(M) onto a roundabout surrounded by the sheer quarry cliff faces.
If you can tell us any more about the Darlington & Merrybent Railway, please email chris.lloyd@nne.co.uk
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