Alan Strickland

I beg to move, That this House has considered the heritage festival of the 200th anniversary of the Stockton and Darlington Railway. It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Stringer. This month we celebrate a pivotal moment in our history: the first steam-powered passenger train, which marked the birth of public rail travel as we know it and had a profound impact on the social, cultural and industrial heritage of Britain and countries around the world. Two hundred years ago, on 26 September 1825, the world’s first passenger locomotive was put on the tracks outside the world’s first passenger train station: Aycliffe Lane, now Heighington station, in my constituency. Locomotion No. 1, designed by Newcastle engineer George Stephenson, was about to make history. On the following day, when the train left Shildon in the Bishop Auckland constituency, steam-hauled passenger railways began and passenger rail was born. More than 450 passengers in converted coal wagons passed through my hometown of Newton Aycliffe, then through Darlington, where the train was greeted by 10,000 people, before reaching the outskirts of Stockton around half past 3 in the afternoon. All modern railways, across the globe, trace their beginnings back to that journey and that incredible part of our heritage. I want to set out, with enormous pride, the impact the event went on to have around the world; the way it transformed our society, culture and leisure time; and how we will celebrate the heritage of our groundbreaking railway with a major cultural festival this year. The contribution of that first journey was enormous. It endowed the north-east and our country with a rich heritage of innovation, inventiveness and ingenuity. It seems strange to think it now, but, because the Stockton and Darlington railway brought passenger rail into being for the first time, it led to the invention of many things that we have long taken for granted.