The text below is a transcription of an article published in the now-defunct York Herald, on Monday 27 September 1875, page 6, col 2.

It recounts memories of some 40 or 45 years earlier about certain Tyneside wooden waggonways and the early steam locomotives operating on the Wylam Waggonway.

The author is unnamed but clearly had a close connection and interest in the events taking place around him. It is possible that the newspaper is merely recycling an article previously published in a more local journal but if so I have yet to discover the original source.

The illustration (above) for this story was kindly provided by Bethany Whitehead especially for this blog. Her work is showcased on Tumblr as Bethany Bluebell Illustration and is well worth a look.

The series of talks on early railways set up for the 2013 Puffing Billy Festival has been both informative and entertaining. However, the one on 25th September by Jim Rees entitled Hedley, Chapman and Isaac Jackson - who really did what? provided a gem of a story with a local interest that I just had to follow up.

Unlike my recent blog, Puffing Billy & the Heddon Balloon, where my early railway connection with Close House was somewhat fanciful, this story incorporates both real old news reports and cutting-edge research. That account also has one of Bethany Whitehead's drawings.

It's worth pointing out here that Close House always was, and still is, firmly in the parish of Heddon on the Wall, but is often referred to in the press as Close House, near Wylam, or worse, Wylam's Close House. This fact was pointed out in a letter to the Hexham Courant by Ian Armstrong, Chairman of Heddon Parish Council, published Monday, 1st October 2012.

I would like to thank Jim Rees (now at Beamish Museum) for providing much of the information I have used below. It was published in Early Railways 4 (Ed. G Boyes, 2010; ER4) as a followup section to his paper, The Sans Pareil Model: its purpose and possible origins, read at the Fourth International Early Railways Conference. The field of early railway research is a complicated and confusing one and any mistakes in the report below are my own, due both to my poor note keeping during Jim's lecture, and my even worse understanding of the issues and engineering.

Among the many things I learned in this talk, completely new to me, was about another Wylam man, Isaac Jackson, and his possible, mostly unsung, role in assisting in the local development of early steam locomotives that was taking place around him.

I found the amusing cartoon above when scouring the web for pictures of Puffing Billy that could be of interest for the Puffing Billy Festival. It was drawn by Bethany Whitehead as her entry in 2013 for the Macmillan Prize for Children’s Book Illustration, entitled The Grand Adventure of Professor Meriwether and his ship Spiritus and she has very kindly allowed me to use it here. Her work is showcased on Tumblr as Bethany Bluebell Illustration and is well worth a look.

I also realised that it would make the ideal illustration for an historical local event that took place on 8th September 1831 during celebrations in Newcastle for the coronation of King William IV who died without legitimate children in 1837 and was succeeded by his niece, Queen Victoria.

The Waggoner is a a traditional Tyneside ballad of the Great Northern Coalfield from the days of horse-drawn waggonways which carried coal from the colliery to staiths on the River Tyne. Songs like these were originally passed down by oral repetition and are thus subject to many changes over the course of time.

The version set down by in 1812 by John Bell, a Gateshead land surveyor, in his Rhymes of Northern Bards is shown below:

Archaeologists looking for Roman remains have stumbled across an even more historic find - a wooden railway which was instrumental in the development of the Industrial Revolution.

An excavation on the banks of the Tyne unearthed a stretch of waggonway which is more than 200 years old, making it the earliest surviving example of the standard-gauge railway.

The discovery was originally part of a network which linked the ports of the North East with collieries in Tyneside and Northumberland in the late 18th century.

The waggonway is made up of a heavy duty 'main way' with two sets of rails laid on top of each other to preserve their longevity, with a loop from the main line descending into a dip.

That depression would have been filled with water where coal wagons' wooden wheels were rested to stop them drying out and cracking. In the middle of the loop is a stone elevation where the horse pulling the waggon would have stood. It is the first time such a 'Watering Pond' has been recorded, although previously known from maps.

To focus my mind on the Wylam Waggonway for the Puffing Billy Festival I decided to create a map of the waggonway so that I could discuss some things that interest me along its route. As always I am particularly interested in finding clues to the past which can still be seen today.

This will be an ongoing blog and I will add to it as I feel inspired.

Key to map above:
Red: North Wylam, Newburn & Scotswood Railway where it diverges from the route of the former Waggonway.
Blue: approximate route of Wylam Waggonway (1859 Map)
Green: Mineral line (single track) closely parallel to railway line (double track) - possibly on the original waggonway line.
Purple: Early Throckley Waggonway (1859 map)
Pink: Later Throckley Waggonway (1897 map)
Yellow: Throckley Isabella Mineral Railway (1897 map)
Light Blue: North Walbottle Waggonway (1859 Map)
Yellow Pin: Named feature

As part of my research for the Puffing Billy Festival this summer I decided to see what I could find out about the eastern end of the Wylam Waggonway. This was built to carry coal from Wylam Colliery to coal staiths on the River Tyne at Lemington.

Robert made reference to several sources in his talk:

The furthest navigable point upriver on the River Tyne was at Stella near Blaydon. There were staiths here where coal was loaded onto flat-bottomed keels for transport down river to colliers. An early wooden waggonway (1600s) approached the staiths from the west along what is now the course of the modern B6317 road via Hedgefield and Crookhill south of old Ryton village. The Runhead Inn marks the top of the incline.

A northern branch of this waggonway served pits just east of Prudhoe and may have crossed the Stanley Burn on the old bridge now in woodland south of the main road.

The Wylam wagon-way was built around 1748 to a five foot gauge, and was used to transport coal from Wylam to Lemington where coal staiths stood to load shallow-bottomed keel boats for shipment down the River Tyne.

The closure of the Wylam Colliery in 1868 resulted in the wagon-way having very little use, until the Scotswood  to Wylam railway line opened in 1875-76, following much of the wagon-way route. Heddon-on-the-Wall Railway Station was added 5 years later in 1881. The platforms were staggered each side of a level crossing, that to the east, on the north side of the double track, used by trains traveling east towards Newcastle.

This 'Northern' line also included a spur which ran into the yard of the Margaret Pit and Heddon Brick Works. This so-called 'triangular junction' can be seen in the map below, west of Heddon Station. Only the east side of this junction is retained today in a strip of woodland and existing field boundaries. The west side has been ploughed out within an arable field. The road that runs steeply downhill south of Heddon village is named Station Road. It ends at Heddon Haughs Farm on the line of the wagon-way. Large scale maps show that the colliery line ran parallel to the main line, passing directly behind the Newcastle platform.

Heddon-on-the-Wall Railway station, situated near Heddon Haughs Farm,  was closed in 1958, and finally demolished in 1959. The current Heddon Haughs farmhouse, south of the wagon-way, incorporates the original Station-Master's house.

The 'Northern' railway line was closed in 1966 and the tracks were removed in 1972. This part of the route was then turned into a public bridleway and cycle track.

Since I first came across it, I was puzzled by the branch line (shown below) that bends south away from the wagon-way close to the east side of the 'triangular junction', running through Cathouse Plantation. It is clearly a disused railway line or wagon-way, built-up on colliery waste. In one place, the farmer has cut through the bank to provide access between the neighboring fields. The line appears to have terminated on the bank of the River Tyne, just west of the Tide Stone.

None of the old OS maps shows the existence of a track along this route, making it likely to have been in only temporary use. I wondered at first if it had provided a way of disposing of pit waste form Heddon Colliery, perhaps by dumping it in the river.

On October 10th, John Gillot, a member of our Society, gave us a talk about Railways in Northumberland. I walk a lot in many different areas of the countryside and often come across disused railway lines and wonder where they came from and where they went to. Railway history has always seemed so well documented that there can't be much left unknown, and it's a subject I've always left well alone.

Inspired by John's talk, I looked for a suitable book and after a little research picked 'Lost Railways of Northumberland' by Robert Kinghorn published by Countryside Books in 2006. It seemed to cover all the lines that might interest me, is not too big, and has a nice painting on the cover of a steam train at Lambley Station with the viaduct behind.

It's a statement in the first chapter that I want to discuss here which gave me a glimpse into a more confused world of railway history research than I had expected.

The chapter deals with the Newcastle & Carlisle Railway (N&CR). The existing line from Newcastle Central Station now crosses the river by the King Edward VII Bridge and runs on the south side of the Tyne. The railway, however, first crossed the river by the first (wooden) Scotswood Railway Bridge, built  in 1839, and approached Newcastle on the north bank. The disused bridge (the third) that still crosses at this point, was built in 1871, and was used until 1982, when passenger trains were re-routed via the King Edward Bridge.