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Wollaton Hall near the Southern terminus of the Wollaton Wagonway. The Wollaton Wagonway (or Waggonway), built between October 1603 and 1604 in the East Midlands of England by Huntingdon Beaumont in partnership with Sir Percival Willoughby, [1] has sometimes been credited as the world's first overground wagonway and therefore regarded as a significant step in the development of railways.
A wagonway was built at Prescot, near Liverpool, sometime around 1600, possibly as early as 1594. Owned by Philip Layton, the line carried coal from a pit near Prescot Hall to a terminus about half a mile away. [2] Another wagonway was Sir Francis Willoughby's Wollaton Wagonway in Nottinghamshire built between 1603 and 1604 to carry coal. [3]
It has been suggested that these are somewhat older than that at Wollaton. [10] [11] The Middleton Railway in Leeds, which was built in 1758 as a wagonway, later became the world's first operational railway (other than funiculars), albeit in an upgraded form. In 1764, the first railway in America was built in Lewiston, New York as a wagonway. [12]
Strelley is also notable for being the upper terminus of one of the earliest recorded railway lines in the world, the Wollaton Waggonway. The railway ran to Wollaton. Horse-drawn coal wagons travelled to their destination on wooden railway lines. This type of railway is known as a wagonway and it was completed during
[citation needed] The wagonway ran from Strelley, where Beaumont held mining leases, to Wollaton Lane. [1] Beaumont was a successful coal prospector and an innovator in the development of mining techniques. A key innovation currently attributed to him is the introduction of boring rods to assist in finding coal without sinking a shaft.
However, by far the greatest number of wagonways were near Newcastle upon Tyne, where a single wagon was hauled by a horse on a wagonway of about the modern standard gauge. These took coal from the pithead down to a staithe , where the coal was loaded into river boats called keels.
The first railway in Britain was the Wollaton wagonway, built in 1603 between Wollaton and Strelley in Nottinghamshire. It used wooden rails and was the first of about 50 wooden-railed tramways built over the subsequent 164 years. [3]
Guide to Railway History, worldwide (2016) Waggonway Research Circle: The Wollaton Wagonway of 1604. The World's First Overland Railway Archived 2012-02-18 at the Wayback Machine, August 2005; Adams, Cyrus C. (January 1906). "The World's Great Railroad Enterprises: Big Schemes on Every Continent". The World's Work: A History of Our Time. XIII ...