Hetton-le-Hole

A colliery ahead of its time

When the Hetton Coal Company began sinking a new, deep colliery here in 1820, it needed a way to move coal eight miles to a waiting wharf on the River Wear. Rather than the usual horse-drawn wagonway, the company's engineer, George Stephenson, proposed something new: a railway using only steam and gravity, with no horses at all.

A world first

The Hetton Colliery Railway opened on 18 November 1822 — the first entirely new line Stephenson ever built, and the first railway anywhere in the world designed from scratch to run without animal power, combining stationary winding engines on the steepest inclines, self-acting gravity planes, and some of the very earliest steam locomotives. It was considered such an engineering marvel that visitors travelled from as far as America and Prussia to see it, three full years before Stephenson's more famous Stockton & Darlington Railway opened to the public in 1825.

A mining town's long century

The railway ran, largely unchanged, for well over a century, and Hetton-le-Hole itself grew from a scatter of hamlets into a substantial mining town through the 1800s. Along with neighbouring Houghton-le-Spring, it joined the City of Sunderland's borough — and Tyne and Wear — in 1974, having previously been part of County Durham. A public trail today traces part of the old railway's route.