The Brampton Railway was a mineral railway built in 1798 to bring coal from workings on Tindale Fell to staiths at Brampton. It was a development of short sections of earlier wooden railways.
When the Newcastle and Carlisle Railway was opened in 1836, the Brampton Railway was diverted to make a junction with that line. The section from the junction to Brampton was later transferred to the North Eastern Railway, carrying passengers and goods, but it closed in 1923.
The remainder became dedicated to serving collieries and other mineral workings, and was successively extended in the remote hills south of Brampton. It flourished when the collieries did well, but after nationalisation of the pits in 1947 steep decline set in and the line closed in 1953.
The line has been known by a number of names during its existence, including the Tindale Fell Railway, the Midgeholme Railway, the Hartleyburn & Brampton Railway, and simply the Brampton Railway.C E Lee, The Brampton Railway, in the Railway Magazine, May and June 1942
Earliest times The East Cumberland coalfield was one of the earliest in Britain to be worked, probably from Roman times. In the seventeenth century and subsequently the Earls of Carlisle developed the workings, and it appears that by 1775 wooden railways were in use on Tindale Fell for short-distance movement of small wagons.
explains:
A railway of 5½ miles in length was made in 1775, from the Earl of Carlisle's colliery at Tindale Fell to Brampton. It was the scene of an early experiment with wrought iron rails, in about the year 1808. It was originally laid with cast iron fish-bellied rails. Moore says that boring for coal on Tindale Fell... was in progress in 1628. In 1769 the Earl of Carlisle was carrying on Tarnhouse or Tindale Fell colliery, beside the Talkin and Midgeholme collieries. The railway along which the coals were conveyed by horses in chaldron waggons, did not take the same route exactly, nor was it so long as the existing [i.e. later] railway, which begins at Brampton, and terminates at Lambley station on the Alston branch of the NER.
Lee disagrees with this account:
Mr. Dendy Marshall ... quotes no authority for the assertion, and the present writer’s researches tend strongly to indicate that the line through to Brampton was built more than two decades later. There were probably wooden wagonways at Tindale Fell colliery as early as 1775, but it seems clear that the through line to Brampton was built by the Earl of Carlisle about 1798.
A through line to Brampton was constructed in 1798, reaching the staithes there, and the first wagon of coal was brought down from Tindale Fell colliery in April 1799. The waggonway, five and a half miles in length, was constructed in timber, and the wagons were hauled singly by horses.
Thompson wrote (in 1900): "I doubt if anyone now living can say accurately when this tram road was made; it is marked on old maps as far back I believe as 1774, and was probably in existence long before that.W. B. Thompson, in the Railway Magazine, April 1900
The timber track was soon replaced by cast iron fish-bellied rails on stone block sleepers, and in 1808 the track was again relaid, about two-thirds of the extent with rolled wrought iron rails and the remainder with cast iron. The line was famous for its early introduction of the new material. "[Wrought iron in edge rails] was first used by itself, without a wooden rail below it, in a humble way at Tindale Fell near Brampton in 1808 and at Walbottle about the same time."
The earliest wrought iron rails had been prone to lamination, but an exchange of newspaper correspondence on the subject produced a robust statement from John Birkinshaw, of the Bedlington Iron Works. Quoting a letter from James Thompson ("the Colliery Agent of the Earl of Carlisle") he says that "apprehensions of lamination and exfoliation are entirely groundless. Thompson's letter of 7 December 1824 is reproduced, saying:
... having under my care a Rail-way, whereon several Miles both of Cast and Wrought Iron Rails are used, I have sent you herewith a Piece of the latter, which has been laid sixteen Years, and certainly has no Appearance of Lamination... The whole of the Wrought Iron, which has been used from 12 to 16 years, appears to be very little worse. The Cast Iron is certainly much worse, and subject to considerable Breakage, although the Rails are about double the Weight of the Malleable Iron Rails.Correspondence in Newcastle Courant, 18 December 1824
In 1808, James Thompson, then fourteen years of age, was employed assisting William Lawson, the agent of the Earl of Carlisle and in 1819 he succeeded Lawson as agent. He sank a new colliery at Blacksyke about 1820 and in 1824 another pit, at Midgeholme. The railway was extended east from Tindale Fell to the Midgeholme pithead, and a branch of three miles was laid to Blacksyke, with a spur to serve a limestone quarry. Considerable earthworks were required to build the new line to a satisfactory gradient.
Connecting to the Newcastle and Carlisle Railway For decades there had been consideration of linking Newcastle and Carlisle, representing the North Sea and the Solway Firth, by some improved means of transport. A canal had been the preferred solution for some time, and after 1823 a branch canal to Kirkhouse was proposed, to connect with the waggonways.Dr Tom Bell, Railways of the North Pennines, The History Press, Stroud, 2015,
It was a railway that was authorised by Parliament on 22 May 1829, when the Newcastle and Carlisle Railway Act was passed. The route to be taken by the line had been controversial, and the Earl of Carlisle had insisted on alterations to the route to protect his interests, including his near-monopoly of coal extraction in the area.
The new railway was to intersect his waggonway at an inconvenient location, and it was agreed that the waggonway would be diverted, crossing the Newcastle and Carlisle line at Milton on the level. (Priestley reported that "At thirteen miles from Carlisle the line crosses a private colliery railway belonging to the Earl of Carlisle."Joseph Priestley, Historical Account of the Navigable Rovers, Canals and Railways of Great Britain, Longman, Rees, Orme, Green and Brown, London, 1831 The opportunity was taken to modernise the technology of the waggonway as well. The Newcastle and Carlisle Railway opened on 19 July 1836, although the Earl of Carlisle's mineral traffic had already been running for a short time (since 13 July), from Milton to Carlisle.Bill Fawcett, A History of the Newcastle and Carlisle Railway, 1824 to 1870, North Eastern Railway Association, 2008, In those few days his traffic had used gravitation from Milton down to Carlisle, the horses riding in dandy carts, and hauling the empty wagons back.William Weaver Tomlinson, The North Eastern Railway: Its Rise and Development, Andrew Reid and Company, Newcastle, 1915, pages 304 and 305
In fact the inclined plane was nearly a mile long with gradients varying from 1 in 22 to 1 in 17½. A wire rope ran the length of the plane supported on rollers, and passed round a drum at the top; it operated on the balanced principle so that full wagons attached at the top drew up empties from the lower level.
The 13 July opening of the Earl of Carlisle's line was a celebratory occasion, and the Earl of Carlisle's two locomotives Gilsland and Atlas worked trains from Kirkhouse to Brampton and back. A regular passenger service was then operated from Milton station to Brampton by horse traction. A steep downward gradient on a portion of the line allowed the horse to ride at the rear of the passenger vehicle.The train from Kirkhouse was a gala event but did not represent the beginning of a regular passenger service, and Kirkhouse was never a passenger station in the ordinary sense. Joy says "Thompson [operated] the Lake Counties' first steam-hauled passenger service between Kirkhouse and Brampton" but this does not imply a regular service, but simply one out and back excursion.K Hoole, A Regional History of the Railways of Great Britain: volume 4: The North East, David and Charles, Dawlish, 1965
The horse-drawn passenger coach was referred to as the Dandy. It met all the trains on the main line at Milton between 8 am and 7 pm on weekdays giving a connection to Brampton.Philip Burtt, writing in the Railway Magazine, March 1900; he may have been referring to a later period.
W. B. Thompson described the working:
The present line falls with a very severe gradient towards the town of Brampton, and the practice used to be to allow the wagons full of coal to run down by gravity, and then, when the load had been discharged, to draw them back empty by horses. There was not a sufficient number of horses employed to deal with the whole of the traffic, so that a gradual accumulation of wagons at the Brampton terminus took place, and when the sidings were full a locomotive was sent down to clear the empties all away.
It is perhaps worth adding that in spite of the absence of signals, continuous brakes, interlocking, and all other precautions dear to the Board of Trade, the passenger traffic was carried on all those years practically without an accident of any kind, the only case in which I can recall a passenger having received injury being one in which the injury was entirely attributable to his own negligence.
Leased to Thompson Early in 1837 James Thompson leased the collieries, limeworks and waggonway from the Earl of Carlisle, and the latter took no further managerial interest in them; Thompson formed the firm of Thompson and Sons of Kirkhouse. In April 1837 Thompson acquired the Rocket, the famous locomotive of the Rainhill Trials that had been designed by Robert Stephenson. He paid the Liverpool and Manchester Railway £300 for it. Rocket was acquired to operate mineral trains, but was too light for the purpose and was laid aside in 1840.The driving wheels had wooden spokes. A photograph in Charters shows the locomotive with wooden infill between the spokes, suggesting that in heavy haul conditions the spokes were inadequate to transmit the traction forces.David Joy, A Regional History of the Railways of Great Britain: Volume 14: The Lake Counties, David & Charles, Newton Abbot, 1983,
Thompson's firm built locomotives from 1839 at Kirkhouse; the first was Belted Will; later Mosstrooper was built there, but this machine had inside cylinders which fouled the rollers on the inclined plane, which was located above Forest Head. Locomotives were required to traverse the incline to reach the upper level, and this unforeseen limitation was serious; a special carriage had to be built to convey the locomotive over the incline.
Thompson improved and extended the existing mine workings, driving drifts and a drainage tunnel over several years, considerably expanding and improving the collieries. However he died in 1851. His widow Maria Thompson took over the firm.
Alston branch In 1851, the Newcastle and Carlisle Railway was completing its Alston branch, running from Haltwhistle; the primary purpose of the line was to serve the lead mines in the hills between Alston and Nenthead. The line passed near Lambley and had a short branch to the colliery there, a little west of the new line. The colliery was not operated by Thompson and Sons, but the firm decided to extend their line from Midgeholme to Lambley, and join the N&CR there. As well as serving the colliery output, the connection with the N&CR was valuable. The Thompson and Sons extension and the N&CR branch opened on 5 January 1852. Rails recovered from the by-passed waggonway at Milton were used for this construction.
Development Over the succeeding twenty years, the firm progressively upgraded the track and the wagons, both of which were primitive at first.