NEW research by the Friends of the Stockton & Darlington Railway and Historic England has‘rediscovered’the world’s oldest railway station.
The Heighton & Aycliffe station building in Newton Aycliffe, County Durham, was long thought to date from the mid-1830s, but it has been found to have been completed in 1827. Experts now believe that it is the earliest-ever example of a station, although it was not officially referred to as one until the late 1830s.
It was here that George Stephenson’s Locomotion No.1 (then known as Active) was placed on the rails in 1825 for the inauguration of the SDR.
When the building was commissioned, the concept of the railway station had yet to be developed. Its original purpose was
