Stanhope

Stanhope was an 0-4-0 colliery locomotive built in 1837 by Timothy Hackworth at Shildon Works for the South Hetton Colliery Railway in County Durham, one of the numerous private colliery railways that formed the dense network of mineral lines in the Durham coalfield — the cradle of the early railway age, where the need to move coal from the pithead to the coast had driven the development of railway technology from the waggonways of the seventeenth century through to the steam-hauled colliery lines that preceded the public steam railways of the 1820s and 1830s.

The South Hetton Colliery Railway, like many Durham colliery lines, operated entirely as a private mineral railway without public traffic, connecting the South Hetton colliery in east Durham with the staithes at Seaham Harbour for shipment. Hackworth's Stanhope was a typical second-generation colliery locomotive — robust, simple, and designed for the sustained pulling of heavy coal wagons over the moderate gradients of the colliery approach roads rather than for any express working. The 0-4-0 wheel arrangement gave adequate adhesion for the colliery duty without the complication of more wheels, and the vertical or near-vertical cylinders of Hackworth's characteristic design gave reliable steam admission and exhaust at the slow speeds of mineral working.

Stanhope represents the living tradition of colliery locomotive development that ran from the earliest Trevithick experiments through Hedley's Puffing Billy and Wylam Dilly to the Stockton and Darlington Railway locomotives and beyond. None of the original colliery locomotives of this generation was preserved from the working South Hetton fleet.