The Lake Lock Rail Road was an early, approximately long, horse drawn

narrow gauge railway A narrow-gauge railway (narrow-gauge railroad in the US) is a railway with a track gauge narrower than standard . Most narrow-gauge railways are between and . Since narrow-gauge railways are usually built with tighter curves, smaller struct ...

built near

Wakefield Wakefield is a cathedral city in West Yorkshire, England located on the River Calder. The city had a population of 99,251 in the 2011 census.https://www.nomisweb.co.uk/census/2011/ks101ew Census 2011 table KS101EW Usual resident population, ...

West Yorkshire West Yorkshire is a metropolitan and ceremonial county in the Yorkshire and Humber Region of England. It is an inland and upland county having eastward-draining valleys while taking in the moors of the Pennines. West Yorkshire came into exi ...

England England is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. It shares land borders with Wales to its west and Scotland to its north. The Irish Sea lies northwest and the Celtic Sea to the southwest. It is separated from continental Europe ...

. The railway is recognised as the world's first public railway, though other railway schemes around the same time also claim that distinction.

The company

The Lake Lock Rail Road Company was formed in 1796 with the capital being raised from 128 shares. These were purchased by a broad range of people including a lawyer, banker, doctor, clergyman, merchant and widow. The initial route opened to traffic in 1798, pre-dating the Surrey Iron Railway by five years. It is thus the world's first public railway. The line was built to allow many independent users to haul wagons along the line on payment of a toll, so whilst other railways pre-dated the Lake Lock Railroad, its act of 1793 under the Wakefield Inclosure Act, meant that its status was defined as being public from the outset (unlike the nearby Middleton Railway, which was a private railway). The railway commenced at Lake Lock, near Stanley, Wakefield on the Aire & Calder Navigation and ran broadly in a westerly direction to Outwood, a distance of approximately . In 1804 the route was changed to avoid a steep incline and this resulted in the terminus relocating from Lake Lock to nearby Bottomboat. There were also a number of branches to collieries and a stone quarry. Extensions were constructed to East Ardsley and Kirkhamgate, under a separate Act of Parliament obtained in 1810.

Operation

The primary purpose of the line was the carriage of coal from the various coal pits surrounding the line to the Aire & Calder Navigation for shipment elsewhere. Other goods carried include roadstone, timber and burnt lime. The load of three waggons was hauled by one horse with an average

gradient In vector calculus, the gradient of a scalar-valued differentiable function of several variables is the vector field (or vector-valued function) \nabla f whose value at a point p is the "direction and rate of fastest increase". If the gr ...

of 1 in 70 (1.43%) down to the navigation. The track used edge rails to a gauge of . Goods were charged by toll, initially at 6d per ton, subsequently increasing to 10 ½ d per ton. In 1807 110,000 tons were being carried each year, however this had reduced to 81,000 tons by 1819 with a further reduction to 76,000 tons in 1823. The line gradually declined and was closed in 1836 when the major colliery owner J & J Charlesworth built an alternative railway.

References

{{reflist * Goodchild, J. (2006), ''Early Railways 3'', Six Martlets Publishing Early British railway companies Railway companies established in 1796 Railway lines opened in 1798 Railway lines closed in 1836 Horse-drawn railways 1796 establishments in England 1836 disestablishments in England British companies established in 1796 British companies disestablished in 1836 Railway companies disestablished in 1836