The North Pennine range that separates the once industrial North East and County Durham from Lakeland is a remote and beautiful wilderness of moorland and high Pennine fell.
What marks out this part of England more than anything else is the huge shelf of land mass above 1,500ft that creates a formidable natural barrier and, in the era of the Railway Mania of the 1840s, a seemingly impassable one to a railway.
This geological fact didn’t deter a myriad proposals in that period as a host of companies tried to work out how to fill the 70 mile gap in east-west connectivity. The driver of such intense activity was, firstly, the rapidly developing iron and steel industry in the North East. This drove a huge demand for Cumberland ore from the other side of the Pennines. Latterly another imperative emerged: the Cumberland and the Furness area, so rich in ore, were about to develop their own huge iron and steel plants but desperately needed coke from County Durham.
The early
