Because the Tanfield Railway runs on part of the route of the Tanfield Waggonway, we state that we are the oldest railway in the world. This is true because we are the oldest still working, & our route has significant civil engineering which has been used since 1725. Competitors for the 'oldest' title, including Middleton and Stockton & Darlington, lay claim to much later & different stories which follow on from developments at Tanfield.
We are going to celebrate our tercentenary in 2025, but parts of the Tanfield route are older than 1725, and to understand our history we need to look at why waggonways were used & developed.
Coal was mined in Whickham parish (which included Marley Hill) since at least the 1300s. There were significant accessible coal deposits, but the Church landowners limited production. By the mid 1500s SE England was making increased demand for coal following population growth including immigration, development of local industry, & non-availability of wood due to use for ships. The most easily winnable Tyneside coal was under Whickham parish. Following Henry VIII's changes, the church was under financial & state pressure, & then Queen Elizabeth I herself needed money to maintain the military & power. So the Church sold the mineral rights of Whickham to the Crown, and the Crown effectively handed those rights to a developer, who himself was forced to sell the rights to the Newcastle hostmen (merchant venturers). These hostmen controlled all coal traffic from the Tyne, & had been looking to expand their fortunes by satisfying the burgeoning market of SE England.
Circa 1600, many areas of England were producing coal for local use, but it was prohibitively expensive to move any distance over land. NE England was connected to SE England by the North Sea, and the coal around Newcastle could be moved to the seaport at Shields via keels on the Tyne. The bulk 300 mile sea trip by brig to London was reckoned to cost no more than a 3 or 4 mile journey of the same amount of coal by horse & ox drawn wain on roads of the time.
The scene was now set: consumer demand, availability & control of resources, cheap water transport, plus the thirst for wealth & power by a rising merchant class. All that had to be added were the technological advances to increase production & satisfy demand. There were improvements in mining techniques, but the new waggonways of the 1600s enabled coal to be moved cheaply & reliably in bulk & opened up the highly productive coalfield away from the Tyne.
Thus the Newcastle hostmen built the Whickham Grand Lease Waggonway. This is thought by 1621 to be taking coal from Whickham, down Lobley Hill to keels at Dunston. The Lobley Hill incline was later used as part of the Tanfield Waggonway - so part of our route dates from 1621 (although not now used).
The High Main seam, up to 12 feet thick, lies close enough to the surface at Whickham for 1600s technology. The same seam underlies Tanfield, but increased depth, drainage & distance from the Tyne made it economically unviable. However, customer demand, competition, mining techniques, drainage engines & waggonways developed in parallel over the next 100 years.
So the Tanfield Waggonway was built around 1725 to exploit more & easily accessible coal around Tanfield. By this time, waggonways were a well known & costed mechanism, but to avoid the legal problems which beset other 'partnerships', the 'Grand Allies' signed themselves into a binding 99 year agreement. This meant that capital could be safely invested in the Tanfield Waggonway & collieries. Hence our waggonway had massive never-before-seen civil engineering, became a spinal route to which collieries & other waggonways were connected during their lives, and lent itself to repeated modernization, lasting well into BR operation (1980 at Redheugh). The Tanfield Railway still runs over the 100 ft high, 300 ft broad Causey embankment of 1725.
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