BR steam era views on Teesside, including activities on two of the earliest public railways in Britain, the Stockton & Darlington Railway to the south side of the Tees and the rival Port Clarence Railway, the latter company’s line passing through Norton at a triangle of lines (nominally the West Hartlepool and Stockton branches of the North Eastern Railway) and reaching the north side of the Tees at Port Clarence. These two railways were built to transport coal to the Tees for onward shipment, and as the expansionist company of the area it was the NER that ultimately prevailed, Clarence Railway and S&DR assets all being under its ownership from 1863 and were thereafter at the heart of a singular cohesive and busy network.
In Colour
NER ‘Q6’ 0-8-0 No 63407 runs light engine west from Tees Yard and through Bowesfield on 13 March 1967. It has just crossed the River Tees, this line being the Middlesbrough extension of the Stockton & Darlington Railway. Famously, the S&DR opened on 27 September 1825 and ran from near Shildon to Stockton-on-Tees, the principal yard that acted as an east end passenger terminus in the 1845-48 period being out of view to the left, on a branch and only about 400 yards distant, but with a quayside extension beyond; ‘stations’ as we now know them were unknown. Locomotives were used for mineral traffic to the Tees but the river at Stockton was not navigable for large ships at that time, hence the S&DR creating Bowesfield Junction (out of view to the left) and its 1830 link to Middlesbrough, and in time this evolved into the NER Darlington-Saltburn route. The sidings in the foreground served Bowesfield Steel Works, a glimpse of the meandering Tees is to the distant left, and in the far distance, just left of Stockton town hall clock tower, is Middlesbrough transporter bridge, just visible, which is a destination across these pages. R N Smith Collection
On Thursday, 11 June 1964 ‘Q6’ 0-8-0 No 63340, numerically the first of the class, negotiates the Bowesfield Junction to Hartburn Junction curve with a class ‘H’ goods (the lower headlamp in the centre of the buffer beam is filthy and hard to see) running from Tees Yard to Hartlepool and formed of wagons of the type often used to carry timber pit props. These two junctions are part of a triangle of lines, the Leeds Northern Railway (LNR) main line of 1852 being that in the foreground – to the right are Hartburn West or Stockton Cut Junction (1¼ miles), the southern point of the triangle, and Eaglescliffe (2¼ miles), and Stockton-on-Tees station is to the left. In addition, an NER link from Bowesfiel
