Summary
Part of an embanked section of disused public railway built around 1828, surviving as an earth embankment with a raised stone-built track bed.
Reasons for Designation
The Chequerbent embankment of the Bolton and Leigh Railway, part of an embanked section of disused public railway built around 1828, is scheduled for the following principal reasons:
* Period: as a surviving sample length of one of the earliest public railways in the country, which was part of the first network in the world of public railways owned by different companies;
* Rarity and potential: possessing an unusual form of construction for the period, more details of which are likely to be revealed through further documentary research and investigation;
* Survival: retaining over 500m of its length, and little-altered, particularly at its southern end;
* Documentation: the line’s construction is documented in publicly available records, which attest to George Stephenson’s personal involvement in selecting and surveying the route, and in designing this length of line.
History
Railways evolved rapidly from the late-C18 to the 1830s. This era saw a transition from horse-drawn haulage along wooden or cast-iron tracks, for the purpose of moving heavy wagons over relatively limited distances in mining or other industrial contexts, to the world's first modern, fully locomotive-hauled, main-line trunk railways linking major cities. The development of main-line railways in the early-C19 in England not only profoundly changed the economy and society of the country, but also influenced the construction of railways internationally. The 1820s and 1830s saw a wide range of developments not only in terms of mechanical and civil engineering, but also in business, financial and legislative practice. The vested interests of large landowners, canal companies and turnpike trusts all had to be accommodated and could prove to be as much of an obstacle as the limitations of the available technology.
George Stephenson (1781-1848), who has been styled the ‘father of the railways’, was a key player, particularly in the 1820s. He was the engineer for the construction of the Stockton & Darlington Railway (S&DR, opened 1825, parts of which are scheduled under National Heritage List for England – NHLE – entry 1002315) and with his son Robert (1803-1859) established the world’s first factory for constructing steam locomotives. He also established (in 1824) what would now be seen as a railway engineering consultancy business, employing several apprentices and assistants, many such as Joseph Locke (1805-1860) going on to have significant careers in railway engineering.
Much of Stephenson’s time in the second half of the 1820s was taken up with the Liverpool and Manchester Railway (L&MR, opened 1830), but he also worked on a number of other schemes, the Bolton & Leigh Railway (B&LR) being the next to open after the S&DR, two years before the Canterbury & Whitstable Railway (C&WR, opened 1830) and the L&MR, which were both also engineered by Stephenson. All four of these pioneering railways employed rope haulage with stationary steam engines to overcome steep inclines but were otherwise designed for locomotive traction; engineered to take very straight routes in marked contrast to the more winding, contouring routes used by horse-drawn tramways. These four were also all public rather than private railways, intended to be general carriers of goods and passengers for all who could pay, in contrast to earlier railways built and operated for private concerns such as collieries. They also all used the same track gauge of 4 feet 8.5 inches, the gauge that was to become Standard Gauge not only in England but across much of the world.
In 1824 (the same year that the L&MR company was formed) a group of mainly Bolton-based businessmen established their own railway company to improve Bolton’s transport links towards Manchester and the port of Liverpool. Two options were surveyed for engineer Hugh Steel (who around this time appears to have been apprenticed to Stephenson), the final route being selected by Stephenson who was consulted in November 1824. The company secured an Act of Parliament at the end of March 1825 for a railway (the B&LR) linking the Bolton end of the Manchester, Bolton & Bury canal with the junction at Leigh between branches of the Leeds & Liverpool and Bridgewater canals. A cautious approach was taken as no other bills had yet passed for railways in Lancashire; although later correspondence (10 January 1827) from Stephenson indicates that there was a clear original intention to extend the line in due course to link to the then-proposed L&MR, the railway appears to have been presented to parliament as a canal feeder, stopping at the Leeds-Liverpool canal. This caution was vindicated by the failure of the L&MR’s initial bill in July 1825, partly because of opposition from the trustees of the Bridgewater Canal; the B&LR’s Act passed after the insertion of clauses refusing permission to cross the Leeds-Liverpool. Despite these clauses, the L&MR board was reported in May 1826 (after they had finally secured their own Act) as anticipating a junction with the B&LR to allow goods and passenger trains to run between Bolton and Liverpool.
Details of the engineering design of the B&LR line appear similar to Stephenson’s S&DR, such as using wrought-iron rails fixed via cast-iron chairs to stone sleeper blocks. However, embankments on the S&DR are thought to have been simply consolidated spoil excavated from cuttings elsewhere. This momument appears to be more sophisticated, incorporating dry-stone walling.
Robert Daglish (1779-1865) was engaged to oversee construction of the line, assisted by Stephenson’s younger brother Robert (1788-1837). George Stephenson met with Daglish in January 1827 and found that Daglish had proposed variations with which Stephenson was dissatisfied. This included the section southwards from Chequerbent that had been mis-profiled to include a mile long flat section between rope-hauled inclines. Stephenson resurveyed the route and produced some fresh plans and costings to complete the line, these being documented in a letter dated 28 February 1827. These appear to have been enacted and included 'some deviation in the Line near Chequerbent which will considerably lessen the expense of crossing the low ground in approaching that place': this is considered to refer to the monument.
The first section of the line (between Bolton and collieries north of Chequerbent) was opened commercially on 1 August 1828 using a steam locomotive which had been commissioned by the L&MR from Stephenson’s son Robert to test the practicality of using coke rather than coal. This was the ‘Liverpool Travelling Engine’, a milestone in early locomotive design, which had been put to work on the B&LR because the L&MR was still at a too-early stage of construction. This locomotive was renamed by the wife of the B&LR’s chairman on the opening day as the ‘Lancashire Witch’ and was retained by the company. The coach used for dignitaries on the opening day was also supplied by the L&MR. A newspaper report of the opening states that this coach was ‘intended at some future period to convey passengers on the railway’.
In late 1828, with construction of the L&MR well underway, plans were developed to link it via a branch line to the B&LR. This link, crossing the canal that had blocked the B&LR, was designed by Stephenson’s brother Robert and was taken forward by a new company (the Kenyon and Leigh Junction Railway - K&LJR) which obtained its Act of Parliament on 14 May 1829. Thus the clauses forbidding the B&LR to cross the canal were not broken. The remainder of the B&LR to Leigh was completed by the end of March 1830. The K&LJR was opened on 1 January 1831 for goods services, allowing the first trains to operate over lines owned by multiple companies – a milestone in the early development of the national rail network. Some of these trains were hauled by Timothy Hackworth’s 'Sans Pareil', one of the entrants for the L&MR’s Rainhill Trials in October 1829. Sans Pareil worked for the B&LR from 1831 to 1844, having a longer working life than Robert Stephenson’s 'Rocket' which had won at Rainhill. Regular passenger services, between Bolton and Liverpool (direct) or Manchester (changing at Kenyon Junction) started in June 1831. In 1836 an Act was passed which saw the operation of the K&LJR effectively taken over by the B&LR. In 1845 a further Act saw the merger of the two companies with the L&MR and the Grand Junction Railway, with further mergers the following year to create the London & North Western Railway (LNWR).
The line had been built as a single-track line, two-way working facilitated by passing loops. Although locomotive traction had improved so that rope haulage on the inclines had ceased (probably by 1846), the severe gradients caused operational difficulties. In the early 1880s the LNWR upgraded the line to dual track and constructed deviations to reduce the gradient of the two main inclines. This resulted in the embanked section of line north of Chequerbent (the monument) being bypassed by a new track bed at a lower level to the west. The stone revetment walling on the western side of the embankment towards the north end is thought to have been built as part of this work. The original line was however retained as a mineral branch line serving Chequerbent Colliery. The in-situ survival of sleeper stones along this line to the south of the A6 (outside the scheduled area) suggests that the original track-bed was not upgraded and that the sleeper stones were generally left in place when the rails were lifted, sometime between the surveys for the 1936 and 1954 1:2,500 Ordnance Survey (OS) maps. Around 1890, the Thirlmere aqueduct (supplying Lake District water to Manchester) had to pass through the embankment. The stone-faced portal on the west side, and brick portal on the east side, are both thought to be of this date.
Regular passenger services along the route of the B&LR ended in 1954, the line being closed in stages through the 1960s until final closure in 1969. The line was cut through by the construction of the M61 motorway in 1970, removing around 250m of the north end of the embanked section. By the B&LR’s 150-year anniversary in 1978, it was reported that few remains of the line survived. The embankment now stands mostly in agricultural land between the A6 and the M61, to the east of the A58 that links those two roads, and with some industrial premises to the west.
Although the history of the line was largely outlined in a 1978 article in Railway magazine, no archaeological investigations of the line’s remains have yet been reported. Stephenson’s progress report on the line's cuttings and embankments, dated 28 August 1828, is contained in the National Archives at Kew (RAIL 1015/5). The report of the two Prussian engineers, Von Oeynhausen and Von Dechen, who visited the line and described its building in some detail, was translated by the Newcomen Society as its Extra Publication No 7, in 1971. These sources were not available for the preparation of this entry.
Details
PRINCIPAL ELEMENTS: part of an embanked section of disused public railway built around 1828, surviving as an earth embankment with a visible stone-built track bed.
DESCRIPTION: the embankment runs for around 540m, beginning around 30m north of the A6 and ending at the footpath on Punch Lane, which runs along the south side of the M61 embankment. It is aligned roughly south-west to north-east but for ease the long sides are described as west and east, and the short ends as south and north.
It is effectively a viaduct, carrying the railway over the undulating ground and the valley of a small stream, at a gentle gradient of around 1 in 400. It comprises steeply-banked slopes (of approximately 45 degrees) to the west and east sides, with a dry-stone track bed 24 feet wide along the full length of the top. The overall height of the embankment is around 4m along most of its length, although its height varies on the east side where the ground is undulating, and it is up to 8m high where it crosses the valley of the stream which feeds the lake in Hulton Park.
Around 190m of the south end of the embankment is little-altered. This includes, on the eastern side, a culvert portal for the Hulton Park lake stream, faced with rough-dressed squared, coursed stone and voussoirs. North of this section, the western slope is gradually encroached on by the lower-gradient embankment which carried the 1880s bypass line. This is fully parallel with the original track by about 260m from the south end of the embankment. At the south end the embankment’s width at the base is around 17m, gradually widening to around 25m over the course of 150m to the north. North of where it is joined by the later track, the western slope is only around 3m wide and where it is truncated, it is revetted by a wall of regular-coursed, rock-faced sandstone. This wall ramps up from the track level of the later line where the two embankments meet, to around five courses high, with a coping, and continues at this height. The east side of the embankment is little-altered along its full length. It is however pierced around halfway along by a tunnel for the Thirlmere aqueduct. The tunnel has a four-course barrel of skewed fair-faced brick, and a portal faced with the same brick.
The track bed is built of random-coursed slabs of around 30cm to 60cm length, 10cm to 20cm height, and 30cm width. Along much of the length around half a metre depth of the track bed is visible above the top of the embankment, but in places well over a metre is visible, where the top of the embankment is lower. It is not clear whether this is the result of localised erosion or removal of the original embankment slope, or of the accumulation of additional height to the slopes along most of the length. This suggests that the track bed is of considerable depth, and might in fact stand the full height of the embankment. The track bed is covered with around 50cm of accumulated soil and plant growth, and towards the southern end it is covered by thick growth of rhododendrons. It is thus not clear whether the dry-stone construction extends the full width, or comprises retaining walls with a fill of other material. Further investigation would be required to establish the details of construction. The entire length of the eastern edge of the track bed is distinct and well-preserved. The western edge, particularly along some of the northern half of the embankment, is less clear and more disturbed.
EXTENT OF SCHEDULING: this is focussed on the known surviving remains of the original embankment and does not include the remains of the later line to the west, or the tunnel for the Thirlmere Aqueduct which passes through the embankment. However the scheduling includes an additional two-metre margin for the support and protection of the west side of the original embankment. The western boundary is thus drawn two metres beyond the foot of the western embankment at the south end, and two metres beyond the later stone revetment wall on the western side in the middle and north of the monument. The eastern boundary is drawn to the foot of the embankment and excludes the Thirlmere aqueduct tunnel portal on the eastern side. The northern boundary follows, but does not include, the fence-line along the south side of the footpath along Punch Lane. The southern boundary is drawn to follow, but not include, the boundary marking the domestic curtilage of number 703 Manchester Road.
EXCLUSIONS: the brick barrel of the tunnel carrying the Thirlmere aqueduct is excluded from the scheduling; however the ground beneath this feature is included in the scheduling. Modern services (any gas, water, and drainage pipes, as well as conduits for electricity and telecommunication cabling and inspection/access chambers), including the aqueduct pipes themselves, are also excluded from the scheduling. Fence and wall lines used to define the extent of the scheduling all lie immediately outside the scheduled area.
