W-I-D-E on Wednesday: "Something Old"

We had a walk to and round the Rising Sun Country Park this morning: for once the weather was warm and sunny which makes a change this year!

In the past the area was criss-crossed by multitudes of railway tracks. The Great Northern Coalfield was the most important coal producing area in the Victorian era, and the tracks were constructed to transport coal from the mines to the River Tyne for shipping all over the world.

The tracks were originally made of wooden rails, on which ran horse-drawn carts. Until the second half of the eighteenth century, horses and gravity were the sole means of propelling wagons along the wooden rails. Then came the steam engine followed by the steam locomotive. The Waggonways gave George Stephenson and the other railway pioneers their earliest experience of railway development. Stephenson’s early trials with a locomotive on the Killingworth Waggonway led to the development of the standard railway line gauge of 4 feet 8 1/2 inches being used all over the world.

Over the last few decades the waggonways have been upgraded to cycle/pedestrian tracks, many of which I used in my jogging days. In 2000 North Tyneside Council successfully bid for over £2m worth of funding to transform more than 30 miles of routes as part of the Government's Liveability Fund.

Not many of the old (steel) rails still exist but this short section, where the footpath crosses a small road, seemed a suitable subject for Bobsblips's Widwed challenge today on the theme of "Something Old".