TICKETS PLEASE!

After the warm reception I had for yesterday's terrible pun, I thought I'd reward you with some serious industrial archaeology, which (I discovered in a magazine) is in Stockton-on-Tees, only about 10 miles or so from me, so we went to visit today.

Here's something which I suspect they'd treat with far more respect and attention on the other side of The Pond. This modest building is with a small group of old houses marooned beside a very busy and complicated dual carriageway interchange, surrounded by retail and industrial parks and entertainment complexes, and not all that easy to get to. Here's what's on the rusty and graffiti-scratched information board outside it:

"It was here at St John's Well that the first rail of the Stockton & Darlington Railway was ceremoniously laid by Thomas Meynell, Chairman of the Railway Company, on 23rd May, 1822. 48 Bridge Road, as it is now known, was standing long before George Stephenson's "Locomotion" headed the first train down to the Cottage Row terminus on 27th September 1825. It is reputedly the world's first railway ticket office, although passengers would probably also have bought their tickets* at local inns as in stage coach practice."

So the first rail of the first public railway in the world to use steam locomotives was laid in that scrubby bit of ground in front of what became the first ticket office. B spotted a rotten old wooden sleeper in among the weeds and litter, though it wouldn't have been original.

The plaque on the wall of the building is enlarged in the top right hand corner.

* The information board actually says "tickers", but that's because they didn't ask me to do the proofreading.