The Railway at Middleton in Teesdale

Before the railway reached Middleton

By the middle of the nineteenth century Middleton was already an important village. Lead mining had shaped much of Upper Teesdale, the London Lead Company had a major presence here, farms were moving livestock and produce around the dale, and stone and other minerals were being worked from the surrounding hills.

The problem was getting things in and out.

Barnard Castle had become connected to the growing railway network, but Middleton and the upper dale still depended largely on the road. Anything travelling further had first to make its way down Teesdale by horse and cart. The same was true in the opposite direction for people wanting to reach Middleton.

A railway promised something very different. It could move heavy goods in quantities that road wagons struggled with, give local people quicker access to Barnard Castle and Darlington, and bring visitors much closer to the waterfalls and scenery of Upper Teesdale.

Henry Pease was one of the important figures behind the scheme, while Thomas Witham of Lartington Hall became chairman of the Tees Valley Railway Company. The London Lead Company also had an interest in better transport through the dale, although the railway that eventually emerged would carry far more than lead.

Parliament gave the scheme its authority on 19 June 1865 through the Tees Valley Railway Act.

The route would continue up the dale from the railway near Cotherstone, passing Cotherstone, Romaldkirk and Mickleton before reaching its terminus opposite Middleton.

It was a relatively short railway, but Teesdale was not going to make building it easy.

Building the railway through Teesdale

The engineers responsible for the Tees Valley Railway were Alexander Nimmo and Thomas F. MacNay. The route had to cross a landscape cut by rivers and becks, and two of the biggest obstacles were the valleys of the Balder and the Lune.

The answer was a pair of substantial stone viaducts.

Balder Viaduct was built with nine arches crossing Baldersdale. Lune Viaduct, near Mickleton, used five large arches to carry the railway high above the valley. They were expensive pieces of engineering for a small branch railway and remain two of the most impressive reminders that the railway ever existed.

Weather also slowed the work. Upper Teesdale was hardly the easiest place to carry out major construction, and the railway took almost three years from Parliamentary approval to opening.

By February 1868 the route was sufficiently complete for a test train to travel along the line. The final preparations followed during the spring.

Then came 12 May 1868.

The day the railway arrived

The formal opening of the Tees Valley Railway on 12 May 1868 was not a quiet affair.

An inaugural train travelled from Barnard Castle carrying a large party into Teesdale. It passed through the new stations and across the viaducts before reaching the terminus at Middleton.

Waiting there were two bands.

From the station, the visitors were led towards the village, where a decorated triumphal arch had been erected carrying the words “Success to Enterprise”.

It is difficult now to imagine quite what that day must have felt like. Middleton had spent generations connected to the outside world by road, horse and cart. Suddenly a steam train had arrived at the edge of the village with a direct railway connection towards Barnard Castle and the national network beyond.

The celebrations continued in the London Lead Company's schoolroom, where a large tea was held. Henry Pease spoke about the railway and the difficulties the Teesdale climate had caused during construction. There was also recognition that local wishes had been respected over Sunday travel, with no Sunday train service planned.

Perhaps most interestingly, people were already looking beyond freight and industry. The scenery of Teesdale, Middleton and High Force was being talked about as something the railway could open to visitors.

Tourism was part of the railway story almost from the beginning.

Regular public services followed the formal opening and Middleton had entered the railway age. The contemporary opening account is unusually detailed and preserves the two bands, the triumphal arch and the celebration in the Lead Company schoolroom.

A station in Yorkshire for a village in Durham

Middleton railway station was not actually in Middleton in the way we might expect today.

The old county boundary followed the River Tees. The main village stood on the Durham side of the river, while the railway approached along the southern side through the old North Riding of Yorkshire.

Rather than take the railway across the Tees, the terminus was built south of the river in Holwick township. Passengers arriving for Middleton therefore still had the final part of their journey to make by road into the village.

There was a practical advantage to stopping there. The railway had already crossed the Balder and Lune on costly viaducts, and ending south of the Tees avoided another major river crossing. It also placed the railway on the same side of the river as some of the quarry workings that would become increasingly important to its goods traffic.

The passenger station itself was never huge. There was a single platform, with the railway ending beyond it, but the wider railway site became much more substantial. There was a goods yard, sidings, a turntable and facilities for locomotives as well as accommodation for the people and goods using the station.

At first the station was simply called Middleton. In June 1894 it became Middleton in Teesdale, helping distinguish it from other places called Middleton on the railway system.

The railway had been built by the Tees Valley Railway Company, but the North Eastern Railway worked the trains from the beginning. The independent company was eventually absorbed into the North Eastern Railway in 1882.

That was not the end of investment at Middleton.

The station grew with the traffic

The railway site people knew later in the nineteenth century was not simply the little terminus of 1868 left unchanged.

By 1884, the North Eastern Railway was buying additional land from John Bowes to extend Middleton station yard. A surviving plan in the Durham archives shows the station and the land required for that enlargement. 

Then, in 1888, a remarkable collection of railway drawings appears.

They are labelled New Station, Middleton in Teesdale and include plans and elevations of the station, details of the roof, doors and windows, the station house, drains and internal fittings. The surviving paperwork also includes specifications, quantities and tenders connected with the work.

Those drawings are useful because they show that Middleton was not simply a forgotten country terminus. Twenty years after the first train arrived, the North Eastern Railway was still spending money improving it.

And one reason becomes obvious when we stop looking only at passenger trains.

The goods yard was becoming a very busy place.

Ironstone arrived by horse before leaving by train

One of the best glimpses we have found into early railway life at Middleton comes from 22 December 1869, only about eighteen months after the line opened.

The Tees Valley Ironstone Company, based in Wigan, was preparing to move ironstone from its workings at Langdon Beck down to Middleton railway station.

But there was no railway running from Middleton to Langdon Beck.

The first part of the journey would still be made the old way.

Extensive stabling was being prepared near High Force for the horses needed to haul the mineral down the dale. Huge road wagons had already arrived. Once they reached Middleton station, the ironstone could be transferred to railway wagons and sent away to ironworks elsewhere in the country.

The amount of traffic expected was large enough that extra loading accommodation was being created in Middleton station yard.

That gives us a brilliant picture of transport in Upper Teesdale at the beginning of the railway age. The railway had arrived, but it did not instantly replace horses. Instead, the two systems met at Middleton. Horses and enormous road wagons brought material in from the upper dale, and the railway took over the journey from there.

The station had become a transfer point between rural Teesdale and industrial Britain.

Stone became one of the railway's biggest jobs

As the years passed, stone and quarry traffic became an important part of the railway's life.

The area around Middleton contained major whinstone workings, and companies such as Ord and Maddison developed quarry operations close enough to make extensive use of rail transport. Sidings and industrial railway connections allowed stone to be moved towards Middleton and transferred onto the main railway.

This mattered because stone is exactly the sort of traffic railways were good at. It was heavy, needed moving in large quantities and could be sent long distances once loaded into wagons.

Middleton station was also equipped for ordinary goods, parcels and agricultural traffic. Railway Clearing House information from the early twentieth century shows that it could deal with cattle and horse boxes, as well as general goods and parcels. The railway was serving farms as well as mines and quarries.

One darker story shows how closely the station was tied to the quarry industry.

On 2 December 1901, James Allinson was working as an assistant blaster at the Middleton whinstone quarries of Ord and Maddison. A charge exploded unexpectedly and brought down an enormous fall of rock. Allinson, who was 62, was buried and killed.

The inquest into his death was not held in some distant courthouse. It took place in the waiting room at Middleton railway station.

That small detail says quite a lot about the station's place in Middleton. It was not simply somewhere people stood waiting for a train. Its rooms could be drawn into the wider life of the community when they were needed.

If you want to explore more of the industrial story behind this part of Teesdale, our Coldberry Lead Mine and Life in the Teesdale Lead Mines pages go much deeper into the mines and people who worked around Middleton.

Taking the train became part of ordinary life

Railway history can easily turn into a story made entirely from Acts of Parliament, locomotives and station plans, but Middleton's railway lasted nearly a century because ordinary people used it.

There were trains for work, school, shopping and days out. Parcels arrived. Livestock left. Goods for local businesses came into the yard. Railway staff dealt with everything from passengers and tickets to wagons, signals and freight.

Special trains could also be arranged. In 1895, the North Eastern Railway was dealing with a request for a special train between Barnard Castle and Middleton connected with a series of church history lectures.

Then there is a lovely little glimpse from January 1906, when Middleton played Barnard Castle in the Durham Amateur Cup.

Around 170 visitors from Barnard Castle were in Middleton for the match. Not all can safely be claimed as railway passengers from the surviving account, but plenty of them clearly found their way to the station, where the wide view across the dale attracted attention before or after the game.

That is the railway doing something far more ordinary than moving ironstone or quarry wagons. People were travelling between neighbouring Teesdale communities for a Saturday football match.

By 1922, a typical weekday service offered five trains in each direction. Middleton to Barnard Castle could take about 18 minutes, while Darlington could be reached in roughly 53 minutes.

For somebody who had previously relied on road transport down the dale, that was a very different world.

Visitors were arriving for Teesdale as well

The possibility of using the railway to bring visitors into Upper Teesdale had been recognised from the moment the line opened.

Middleton was now connected with Barnard Castle, and from there passengers could travel into a much wider network. High Force, the upper dale and the surrounding countryside were suddenly much more practical destinations for someone coming from Darlington or further afield.

The railway never ran all the way to High Force. Visitors still had to continue beyond Middleton by road or on foot. But Middleton station brought them much closer than they had been before.

Excursion traffic continued long into the railway's life. On 3 June 1963, an excursion left Sunderland for Middleton in Teesdale, proof that people were still making special journeys to the branch little more than a year before passenger services disappeared.

Another rail tour reached Middleton on 30 September 1963, travelling through Barnard Castle before continuing onwards after its visit.

There is something rather sad about those final excursion trains. Visitors were still coming to see Teesdale by rail at almost exactly the moment the railway's future was being decided.

From the North Eastern Railway to British Railways

The Tees Valley Railway Company did not remain independent for long.

Although it had promoted and built the branch, the trains were operated by the North Eastern Railway. In 1882 the North Eastern Railway took control of the undertaking completely.

Middleton then followed the wider changes that swept through Britain's railways.

In 1923, the North Eastern Railway became part of the London and North Eastern Railway. Nationalisation followed in 1948, bringing the line under British Railways.

Steam remained part of the Middleton scene into the 1950s, but diesel multiple units began taking over the passenger service towards the end of that decade. The little engine shed and the days of a steam locomotive working the branch were reaching their end.

The trains looked newer.

The railway itself was about to be judged as something from the past.

The fight to keep the railway

The closure of the Middleton railway is sometimes reduced to a single sentence about the Beeching cuts.

The real story was not quite that simple.

British Railways published its proposal to withdraw the Darlington, Barnard Castle and Middleton passenger service on 6 December 1963. The plan attracted substantial opposition.

A formal hearing at Barnard Castle on 27 February 1964 considered 65 objections to the closure.

Local councils, organisations and individual passengers were worried about what would happen without the trains. The railway was still being used by workers, schoolchildren and other regular travellers. Middleton was also an established jumping off point for people visiting Upper Teesdale.

The argument reached Parliament.

On 29 June 1964, Bishop Auckland MP James Boyden raised the proposed closure in the House of Commons. Around 500 weekday journeys were being made on the service, with commuters and schoolchildren among the people relying on it.

The Transport Users Consultative Committee had looked at the alternatives and concluded that closure would create hardship for existing passengers, severe hardship in some cases. Extra buses and special school services would only partly solve the problem. 

That matters because it changes the usual picture of an empty country railway that nobody cared about.

People did care.

They objected, attended meetings and tried to keep it.

The Minister of Transport eventually gave permission for the closure in September 1964, with changes required to the replacement bus arrangements.

The decision had been made.

The last passenger trains

The final scheduled passenger trains ran on Saturday 28 November 1964.

The official closure took effect on Monday 30 November.

For somewhere that had celebrated the railway's arrival with bands, a decorated arch and a village tea in 1868, it was a very different ending ninety six years later.

The goods trains hung on for a few more months. Freight traffic at Middleton finally ended on 5 April 1965.

That was the real end of the working railway.

By May 1967, the rails had been lifted. The closure dates, the February 1964 inquiry, the objections and the final freight date are also recorded in later railway research.

The station buildings and yard gradually lost the purpose they had been created for, and stretches of railway that had once carried stone trains, livestock, schoolchildren and visitors became empty trackbed.

But the railway never completely disappeared.

Walking the railway today

One of the best things about the Middleton railway story is that you can still follow a large part of it through the landscape.

The Tees Railway Path now uses much of the former trackbed between the Middleton area and Cotherstone. The recognised route runs for around 10 kilometres from Lonton West, near Middleton, to Cotherstone. 

The path crosses both of the great structures built for the railway in the 1860s, Lune Viaduct and Balder Viaduct. Between them are long, level stretches where the shape of the old railway is unmistakable, together with cuttings, embankments and the sites of former stations.

The path itself does not begin at the old Middleton station. From the village it can be reached using public paths towards Lonton, where the surviving railway trackbed becomes part of the present route. The official access directions from Middleton still take walkers across the Tees and through the fields towards Lonton. 

We will eventually give the Tees Railway Path its own Discover Teesdale page, because there is enough surviving railway history along that route to tell the story properly as you walk it.

Until then, our Teesdale Walks and Hiking Routes page has more ideas for exploring the wider dale on foot.

The railway changed Middleton

The railway did not create Middleton. By 1868 this was already an old village with its own industries, farms, shops, chapels, mines and a long history behind it.

What the railway changed was Middleton's connection with everywhere else.

It gave the quarries a way of moving huge quantities of stone. It allowed ironstone from Langdon Beck to leave Upper Teesdale after the first part of its journey by horse. Farmers could use it for livestock and goods. Local people could reach Barnard Castle and Darlington far more quickly. Schoolchildren and workers became regular passengers. Football supporters came up the dale. Excursion trains brought visitors into a landscape that people had been telling travellers about since the railway first opened.

And for ninety six years, anyone arriving in Middleton by train experienced one of the oddest little quirks in the village's history.

Their ticket might have said Middleton in Teesdale.

But when they stepped onto the platform, they were still in Yorkshire.

Only after crossing the River Tees did they finally arrive in County Durham.

For the wider story of the village before, during and after the railway years, continue with our History of Middleton in Teesdale. If you are planning a visit rather than digging through its past with us, the Middleton in Teesdale Visitor Guide brings together the village, walks, waterfalls, places to eat and other things to explore.

And if the industrial side of this story has caught your attention, there is much more waiting in our pages about Coldberry Lead Mine and the wider Teesdale History and Heritage collection.