Hopetown Carriage Works
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Hopetown Carriage Works, built in 1853 by Joseph Sparkes in Darlington (Durham), was a workshop of the oldest railway in the world, the Stockton and Darlington Railway. The first floor of the higher part of the building may have been used as a pattern store and drawing office. The ground floor hall was used for the construction of carriages for the railway company, as well as maintenance work. The building belongs to the first generation of workshops in railway history. The historical site occupies a triangle of land between the track of the Stockton and Darlington railway opened for traffic on the 27th September 1825 and a branch line to a coal depot opened on the same day. The building is of an extraordinary age for a railway company building of this type.
The two-storey building is constructed of small coursed squared sandstone with brick and freestone dressings and has a roof of Welsh slate; the two bay centre section has a Venetian-style entrance feature of a main doorway with smaller doors at either side, and displays stepped, wedge-shaped stonework. The main door, which is now bricked up, was used originally for entry and exit of the rolling stock (each carriage was rotated on a turntable in the centre of the building to face this door). This centre section is flanked by two, eight-bay single storey halls. The building is presently in need of significant maintenance. The borough of Darlington (Durham] considers it of worth for conservation because of its importance in the evolution of railway building design and its rarity as a surviving example of this age. It is also an important part of the Stockton and Darlington railway terminal complex, workshop of the world's first modern railway.
The first commercially used steam locomotive “Locomotion No 1” was on display in a workshop for locomotives of Alfred Kitching on the same site from 1857 to the 1880s. It is also renowned as the office used from 1946 by the last Chief Mechanical Engineer of the LNER, Arthur Peppercorn.
The southern end of the building is used at present by the A1 Steam Locomotive Trust, which is constructing the new locomotive 60163 Tornado there. The other half of the building is used as a workshop by the North Eastern Locomotive Preservation Group ((NELPG) for heavy overhaul of the NELPG collection of locomotives.
