The Industrialist

Messerschmitt Bf 109

This shows why the DB600 series inverted V design was a sensible choice for a piston engined fighter in the 1930s.

blending the past and the future.

P-51

Hetton Colliery

In the late 1700s and early 1800s attempts to find coal in eastern County Durham had failed for many years. From around 1796 John Lyon of Hetton House bored for coal and although his attempts were set back in 1810 by problems with severe flooding he persisted with the challenge. His continued efforts were to no avail and he was virtually bankrupted.

In 1819 a colliery company was formed called The Hetton Coal Company and was the first major public company in County Durham. Its eleven shareholders included a Captain Archibald Cochrane but the main man was a former banker, of previously dubious dealings, called Arthur Mowbray. Three of the shareholders were relatives of Mowbray.

Hullmandel’s 1823 lithograph of Hetton Colliery in the County of Durham projected and managed by Arthur Mowbray.

After the company reached an agreement with John Lyon to lease his land for mining, the operations of sinking for coal began in December 1820. Finally, on September 3rd 1822 coal was successfully reached. Moreover it was high quality coal and there was lots of it. By November it was being shipped to four coal drops at Sunderland via the Hetton Colliery Railway.

Robson of Sunderland’s lithograph marking the opening of Hetton colliery and its railway. 22 November 1822

Named the Lyons Colliery from the landowner, John Lyon, the opening of the new mine was one of the major events in the history of North East coalmining. Many more mines would follow in this eastern part of the Durham coalfield as would many new colliery railways. The Hetton Coal Company became a major player in the coal mining of Durham, competing with the powerful coal-owning figures of Lord Londonderry and John Lambton, the Earl of Durham but without the aristocratic connections these coal owners had.

Arthur Mowbray was a shrewd businessman

Charles Lord Stewart (Marquess of Londonderry from 1822) had sacked Mowbray as manager of the Vane-Tempest collieries in 1819 and appointed John Buddle as his successor. Mowbray’s response was to use the expertise gained from many years in the coal trade, land agency and banking to set up a rival enterprise buying up coal leases round Hetton le Hole.

Hetton Colliery Railway

The Hetton Colliery Company seems to have been very confident of finding coal. In 1819 before the coal was even found they set in motion the development of the Hetton Colliery Railway and employed the then barely known engineer, George Stephenson, who also laid out the colliery, to design it.

George Stephenson

This eight mile long railway was the first in the world to be intentionally built for steam locomotives. It was also, at the time, the longest railway in the world and really set in motion Stephenson’s rise to fame that had commenced at Killingworth Colliery near Newcastle.

At Hetton, Stephenson used steam locomotives but the steep climb over Warden Law Hill to the west of Houghton-le-Spring was going to be a challenge at 636 feet above sea level. This had to be crossed to link the railway to the Wear so stationary engines were utilised on this section of the line to haul and lower the railway wagons.

It left behind one of the railway’s great curiosities: the Hetton Lyon (above). In 1902, it was hailed as “the oldest working locomotive in the world”, and it became a tourist attraction. It was so revered that in 1925 it headed the Stockton & Darlington Railway’s century of steam cavalcade (below, picture courtesy of the JW Armstrong Trust).

However, in recent years in-depth analysis of the Hetton Lyon, which is now in Shildon’s Locomotion museum, has shown that it was really made in about 1849 to Stephenson’s early designs. It is still an interesting mid-19th Century Durham engine, but it doesn’t quite take us back to those earliest days of the Hetton Railway 200 years ago.

The Hetton Lyon at Shildon's Locomotion museum

Courtesy: Northern Echo, England's North East, Hetton Colliery History

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MIRAGE 2000....

6/6

Italian F-104 Starfighter, an Italian Tornado, a Turkish F-104 Starfighter and a U.S. Air Force A-7D Corsair II aircraft  

Lockheed F-117 Nighthawk.

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F-35

rotor assembly

dry oasis