CONTEXT 186 : DECEMBER 2025 19 INFRASTRUCTURE SIMON HICKMAN Reflections on railway heritage With nearly 2,100 listed structures on the rail network, and many more no longer owned by the railway, heritage interests and operational requirements must be balanced. Few will have missed that 2025 is a special year for Britain’s rail network. It is the bicentenary of the Stockton and Darlington, widely accepted as the first modern railway. But railways have existed for considerably longer than 200 years, so why the fuss over a provincial line in northeast England? The Stockton and Darlington was the first ‘modern’ railway that existed in a form we still recognise today. The trains were self-propelled. The public could use its trains, which they caught from stations.These concepts are not wildly different to today’s railway, and that is important. Historic England had been preparing for the bicentenary for some years, with a Stockton and Darlington Heritage Action Zone established in 2020. Drawing together all the local authorities in the area and other stakeholders, the heritage action zone included significant research, a batch of new designations, and coordination of efforts to maintain and restore parts of the line. Steam traction was still in its infancy in 1825, and although the S&D pioneered locomotivehauled trains, early locomotives were too underpowered to climb hills. So the S&D included rope-hauled inclines where a rise in the land dictated them. Many are still discernible today, especially the famous Brusselton incline. Today the disused incline looks almost like a piece of prehistory, rising as an earthwork from the land, with stone sleepers still visible. Quite the contrast with the neoclassical lines of Skerne Bridge, now Grade I listed but continuing to support the passage of mainline trains, the role it has played for 200 years. Historic England has undertaken several exercises in designation as part of the S&D heritage action zone, including identifying Heighington Station as the world’s oldest station. But these early stations were effectively inns, a natural progression from the days of the stagecoach when coaching inns were the stations of their day. One of the earliest surviving stations in original form that still looks like how we The opening of the Stockton and Darlington Railway in 1825, drawn by JR Brown Heighington Station, identified by Historic England as the world’s oldest (Photo: Niall Hammond/Friends of the Stockton and Darlington Railway)
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