THE MIDDLETON MILESTONES

The year 1960 was a landmark one for the infant heritage sector. Three milestones saw it move forward in giant strides, each of them laying down a blueprint for the sector to follow in the decades to come.

That year, the Bluebell Railway became the first section of the closed British Railways network to be reopened by volunteers. The Lincolnshire Coast Light Railway was the first heritage line to be built by volunteers anywhere in the world on a greenfield site and as such to run public services into the bargain.

Unlike the Bluebell, the Middleton Railway was never part of the national network, but history records that it was the first operational standard gauge heritage line, beating its Sussex counterpart by several weeks – but not with steam haulage or a conventional railway carriage.

‘Firsts’ were nothing new to the Middleton. Founded in 1758, the Middleton Railway was the first to be authorised to be built by an Act of Parliament, the line where steam locomotives were first used successfully on a commercial basis, and today the world’s oldest continuously working public railway.

Coal has been worked in the Middleton area since the 13th century, from bell pits, gin pits and later ‘day level’or adits.

Charles Brandling, who inherited the Middleton estates, was in competition with the Fentons in Rothwell who had the advantage of being able to transport coal by river to Leeds. In 1754, Brandling’s agent Richard Humble, from Tyneside, came up with the idea of building a waggonway, the first of which – the following year – ran to riverside staithes at Thwaite Gate.

In 1757, he proposed to build a waggonway towards Leeds, and to empower the project, Brandling sought an enabling Act of Parliament. The result was the Middleton Railway, which carried coal cheaply from the Middleton pits to the staithe at Casson Close, near Meadow Lane, Leeds, close to the River Aire.

The line was privately financed and operated, initially as a waggonway using horse-drawn waggons. Around 1799, the wooden tracks began to be replaced with superior