Great photos Rodel. I was aware of the Chopwell Railway up from Derwenthaugh, but this line is new to me - nice to discover info about "new" railways!! Looking on the OS map site, it appears that most of the trackbed of this line still exists from the site of the drift into the hillside at Hoodsclose to Chopwell. Must get up there to have a look this summer when I'm in the area.

Cheers

Alan

The section which runs through Chopwell Wood must have had alot of coal in the trackbed as during the miners strike I remember seeing people making excavations in the track and wheeling it away on bicycles.

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didn't the Swiss railways have similar main-line locos nick-named 'crocodiles'

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It seems that a number of colliery lines in the North East used reject coal as embankment and trackbed fill for their railways. I remember visiting Seaham Colliery & the harbour after the strike finished. The line from South Hetton down to Seaham never re-opened as embankments built with coal had been dug away by striking miners digging for fuel. A sad state of affairs - damn you Mrs T. !!

Alan

Most of the colliery railways (and there were many of them) used colliery waste as track ballast as it was convenient and cheap and very often had a lot of small coal in it. As anything travelling over these lines would ,at best,only be going at a fast walking speed it did the job required. This is why so many of them are easy to trace to this day because of lack of vegetation and so on. For example there is a footway through the Newton Hall estate at Durham known locally as the "Black Path" which is part of the old trackbed of the line which linked the pits at Framwellgate Moor with the staithes in Seaham's North dock. The loss of the last commercially worked incline in the UK at Seaham was a pity but many years before it closed the track was very uneven and had lots of wiggles in it which were apparent if you watched the sets coming down to Foundry Road. The HSE would have shut it down anyway as the crossing at Foundry Road had no barriers or gates and the only warning you had that a set was on its way was a grubby little red flag plonked into a convenient hole in the road. The locals knew what that was about but a stranger could have ended up in all sorts of trouble ! 😞

On the old trackbed through Chopwell woods which is now a footpath, there is a very short length of track with an old ,but restored coal waggon on it.

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