Tees Marshalling Yard

Tees Marshalling Yard is a railway marshalling yard, used to separate railway wagons, located near Middlesbrough in North Yorkshire, Northern England.

The yard lay on the original Stockton and Darlington Railway (S&DR) extension to Port Darlington, developed from 1828 under the instructions of influential Quaker banker, coal mine owner and S&DR shareholder Joseph Pease, who had sailed up the River Tees to find a suitable new site down river of Stockton on which to place new coal staithes. As a result, in 1829 he and a group of Quaker businessmen bought 527 acres (213 ha) of land described as "a dismal swamp", and established the Middlesbrough Estate Company. Through the company, the investors intended to develop both a new port, and a suitable town to supply its labour. On 27 December 1830, the S&DR opened an extension across the river to a station at Newport, almost directly north of the current Middlesbrough railway station. The S&DR quickly later renamed this new station and associated six-coal staithe dock facility as Port Darlington, hoping to market the facility further. So successful was the port, a year after opening the population of Port Darlington had reached 2,350.

However, with Port Darlington overwhelmed by the volume of imports and exports, in 1839 work started on Middlesbrough Dock. Laid out by Sir William Cubitt, the whole infrastructure was built by resident civil engineer George Turnbull. After three years and an expenditure of £122,000 (equivalent to £9.65m at 2011 prices), the formal opening occurred on 12 May 1842. On completion, the docks were bought by the S&DR.

As Middlesbrough developed, additional railway facilities were required to marshall goods wagons, and allow workers to access the docks and associated industries. So in 1882 South Stockton railway station was built by the North Eastern Railway, opened on 1 October. In 1892 Parliament granted a charter that created the Borough of Thornaby-on-Tees, which incorporated the village of Thornaby and South Stockton, and so on 1 November 1892 the name of the station was also changed.

Thornaby was located on a busy and hence important section of the line for the NER, between Newport and Middlesbrough Dock to the east, and Bowesfield Junction to the west, which had the busiest signal box on the NER system. In 1910, the NER hence built the new Erimus Marshalling Yard, named after the motto of Middlesbrough.

In 1914, as an early adopter of overhead line railway electrification, the NER built the Electric Freight 1 locomotives to haul coal from the Witton Park Colliery at Shildon, along the former Clarence Railway to Redmarshall and then down the Castle Eden Railway to Erimus, for export from Middlesbrough Dock. During the 1920s the coal traffic declined and some of the locomotives became surplus to requirements. The NER was grouped in 1923 as part of the London and North Eastern Railway, and by 1935 the LNER had replaced the electric locomotives with steam.

Although bombed by the Nazi Luftwaffe during World War II, the yard survived and thrived.

In the mid-1950s as part of British Railways modernisation plan, projects were developed to centralise the marshalling of goods wagons and the associated servicing of steam locomotives at the UK's largest freight hubs.