What’s that coming over the hill?

Photographs Gary Calton for The Observer

“We will get 200 years of rail technology in a single frame,” says Steve Davies, chairman of the A1 Steam Locomotive Trust, which carried out Locomotion’s reconstruction. “The prospect is mouthwatering.”

It will certainly be a striking juxtaposition. With a footplate open to the elements and a boiler topped by a stack of thin, vibrating cylinders, Locomotion’s rolling movement is very different from the sleek passage of a modern train. For any railway enthusiast, myself included, it is a pleasure to watch and an even greater joy to ride on, as I did during a trial run of Locomotion on Weardale railway last month. This was an engine that was supposed to frighten onlookers during its first journey, yet its progress was surprisingly gentle. The rhythm of the cylinders, which rise and fall above the boiler, was almost soporific, though sleep would have been hard given the lack of cover or seating. It was nevertheless an exhilarating experience that is in striking contrast to travel on a modern high-speed train – a point that vividly demonstrates the profound changes triggered by the Stockton and Darlington railway.

Before the line opened, transport and communications were dictated by a horse’s speed and strength. Within years, railways were crisscrossing the nation, taking fresh food into cities, ferrying city dwellers to coastal holiday resorts and enabling mass entertainment such as national league football and racecourse meetings. The nation was connected.

“It was like jumping from a Model Ford T to a Space Shuttle in a single leap,” says Davies. Or, as was written in The Times in 1850 about the railways’ effect on London: “Thirty years ago, not one countryman in one hundred had seen the metropolis. There is now scarcely one in the same number who has not spent a day there.”

A rural nation was turned into an industrial power, although this weekend’s party will be tinged with some bitterness in the wake of the government’s most recent rail excursion, the High Speed 2 project. Planned to revolutionise UK transport, it has been reduced to a stump of a line between outer London and Birmingham at a cost of more than £50bn.

After HS2, Britain badly needs a reminder of what technology – in particular rail technology – can do for it, and the celebrations for the anniversary of the opening of the Stockton to Darlington line provides a perfect opportunity.

At the time of its opening, few could have foreseen the immensity of the revolution that lay ahead, although some clearly had an inkling: several hundred people fought to board the freight wagons and the single coach that were towed by Locomotion that day. Thousands of others watched from vantage points along the line, including one overlooking the world’s first rail bridge, which had been built over the river Skerne, while a brass band crammed into two coal wagons serenaded passengers with The Keel Row and Auld Lang Syne.

The journey took them from the mines of Witton Park to Darlington and on to Stockton’s dockyards on the river Tees. On arrival, they were greeted with a 21-gun salute followed by a lavish dinner.

“The line had been [largely] funded by Quakers, who were more liberal in outlook than many others in the UK. As a result, women were invited to the dinner,” says Niccy Hallifax, festival director for S&DR200, which has organised this year’s local celebrations. “However, they were not actually allowed to sit down with the men at the table. They just got to sit at the sides and watch them eat. Emancipation still had a bit to go.”

The Stockton and Darlington Railway was certainly a radical venture but it was not an entirely revolutionary one, historians insist. Grooved tracks once helped ships, on wheeled cradles, move over the Isthmus of Corinth in ancient Greece, while horse-drawn trucks, travelling over rails, had been hauling coal from mines for decades. Similarly, Richard Trevithick had already pioneered the use of high-pressure steam to power locomotives.

However, it was the genius of the railway’s chief engineer, George Stephenson, backed by the line’s main financier, the Quaker businessman Edward Pease, to combine iron tracks, flanged wheels and steam power into a single system and so create the world’s first railway, a 26-mile line that has been copied and repeated over the past two centuries to provide the planet with a web of more than 800,000 miles of track.

“Transporting coal was a major driver for the railway, although Pease was not aiming to provide a private transport system for mine owners,” says Hallifax. “He was seeking something far more revolutionary: a public route for farmers, merchants and others to move goods, while also boosting coal transport into dockyards.”

At the start of the project, Stephenson walked from Witton through Darlington and on to Stockton, and concluded that coaches or canals were not practical. It should be a railway, he decreed, and Pease took his advice.

Work started in 1822 and was completed three years later. Features that we now regard as rail staples, such as signals and timetables, were not added until years later. Similarly, Locomotion’s cylinders, which transfer steam power into mechanical motion, had to be modified. They were originally mounted on top of the engine’s boiler, producing a dizzying mass of machinery that rises and falls in front of the driver and makes a ride on the footplate of the reconstructed engine a disorienting but exhilarating experience. Stephenson moved them to the side of the boiler for subsequent engines.

These towering cylinders are also the reason for switching off the power supply for next weekend’s rail revelries. “They rise so high they could trigger a power discharge from the overhead lines, which would be a bit of a dampener for the festivities,” says Charles Cubitt, who will drive Locomotion into Darlington next weekend.

What was really striking was the speed at which the landscape was transformed by the railway, adds Reuben Kench, chair of the S&DR200 board. “A branch line was soon opened to a little village of five or six cottages called Port Darlington further down the river Tees. It was easier for ships to navigate here and within a few years, it had attracted so much traffic it was transformed into a thriving city: Middlesbrough. And then, when the line reached Saltburn on the coast, this was turned into a lovely seaside resort visited by thousands. That line, on its own, triggered a massive social, economic change.”

Equally striking is the railway station at Heighington, the world’s first. “A siding was built here and merchandise – coal, limestone and gravel – was dropped by train,” says archaeologist Caroline Hardie. “Local folk could then collect it by horse and cart. However, if you have travelled far to collect goods, you might feel a bit of shelter and hospitality was in order and the railway realised it could provide that. The resulting building went on to become the model for all rural rail stations, each with its own station master.”

Unfortunately, Heighington station – until recently a pub – has since fallen into serious disrepair. When I visited earlier this month, empty beer kegs, broken glass and splintered boards littered the floor, while the walls sported graffiti especially uncomplimentary about southern politicians. It will take about £1m to renovate the old rail station into a heritage centre and cafe, says Friends of the Stockton and Darlington, which bought the building in July following a crowdfunding effort.

Clearly the physical roots of the modern railway lie in north England. But its financial drive came from the south, from London, which was about to become the world’s biggest city. It had developed a colossal appetite for coal for heating homes and powering factories but faced a problem in getting it into the city.

Trains that could tow dozens of wagons of coal at a time to docks changed everything and lines soon spread to carry the black stuff directly into the capital, a process that utterly changed the fabric of the city. At one point, navvies were using 100,000 bricks a day to build rail tracks across London, creating more than 3,000 arches which today house pubs, garages and lock-ups for the city’s Arthur Daleys.

For many, these railways represented escape. “They are our gates to the glorious and the unknown,” EM Forster said of London’s rail lines. “Through them we pass out into adventure and sunshine, to them, alas! we return.”

Others simply recoiled in horror, including one clerk who was taken to watch a train for the first time. “As the engine roared past, spewing dense columns of sulphurous smoke, the aghast young man fell prostrate ... as if smitten by a thunderbolt,” states Barbara Freese in Coal: A Human History. “When able to speak again, he asked, miserably: ‘How much longer shall knowledge be allowed to go on increasing.’”

The answer, we now know, is that it continued to do so for two centuries and changed the nation irredeemably. Modern English is now riddled with railway expressions: running out of steam, on the right lines, going off the rails. Meanwhile, the nation’s enduring favourite dish, fish and chips, was created only after rail links to fishing ports made fresh haddock and cod widely available.

In return for the fish, cities sent families who turned Blackpool, Brighton, Bognor Regis and many other towns into seaside resorts where millions would spend their holidays. Anne Brontë, who suffered from consumption, was an early visitor travelling by train from Haworth to Scarborough to take the spa town’s waters on 25 May 1849; she died three days later. Thus her death begs the bad-taste question, posed by Andrew Martin in To the Sea by Train: “Was her train ticket a return?”

Timekeeping was also transformed. Clocks across the nation used to show different times. Plymouth time was about 16 and a half minutes behind Greenwich Mean Time, for example. Then the railways arrived, bringing the need for coherent timetables so that within 30 years, all public clocks across Britain were set to GMT.

Then there was the friction match, a precursor to the safety match, that was invented by the chemist John Walker in Stockton in 1826. “On Locomotion’s first journey they had to use a magnifying glass to ignite a rag to light the engine,” says Hallifax. “However, sunlight is often in short supply in north England, so matches were very welcome and the railway became one of their first bulk buyers.”

The railway was simply the biggest communication advance and aid to democracy in history, says Hallifax. “Apart from allowing people to move about, it made it possible to send national newspapers round the country and send telegrams along wires suspended from poles beside rail tracks. People could travel and so could information.”

S&DR200 runs across County Durham and the Tees valley until 22 November, with the S&DR anniversary celebrations taking place on 26-28 September. Find more at sdr200.co.uk. Railway 200 runs to the end of the year, with events nationwide. For more, visit railway200.co.uk