Coniston Railway

The Coniston Railway was a railway in Cumbria, England, linking Coniston and Broughton-in-Furness, which ran for over 100 years between the middle of the 19th to the middle of the 20th century. It was originally designed for the transport of slate and copper ore from the mines near Coniston to the coast and later developed into a line for tourists to the Lake District. The line opened in 1859 and closed in 1962.

The Romans were mining copper ore in the Coniston area 2000 years ago, and there is evidence that copper was being extracted from the area as long ago as the Bronze Age. Green slate has also been quarried in the area for at least 500 years and there has been a tourist industry for some 200 years. By the middle of the 19th century the copper mines and the slate quarries at Coniston were flourishing, the mines employing 400 men and the quarries were producing an average of 2,000 tons of slate a month. Around this time the Coniston mines were the largest copper mines in the north of England.

Before the railway was built, materials had to be transported in horse-drawn carts to Coniston Water, by barge on the lake, and then again by cart to Broughton-in-Furness. The public had to travel on a horse-drawn "omnibus". In 1848, hoping for an increase in tourism, J. G. Marshall demolished his inn at the head of the lake and replaced it with a "handsome hotel". The Furness Railway had opened their line from Barrow-in-Furness to Kirkby-in-Furness in June 1846 and its extension to Broughton in February 1848. The Whitehaven and Furness Junction Railway opened its line from Whitehaven in 1849 and this reached Broughton in October 1850. Also in 1849 the Furness Railway paid £550 (equivalent to £50,000 in 2015), to improve the road from Ambleside to Broughton (now the A593).

In November 1849 the railway engineer John Barraclough Fell proposed building a railway with a gauge of 3 ft. 3in. from the copper mines at Coniston to link with the Furness Railway at Broughton. John Robinson McClean, engineer of the Furness Railway, reported this to the Earl of Burlington (later to be Duke of Devonshire), the company's chairman, recommending that the line should be of standard gauge. However no further action was taken at that time. Interest in the line revived in 1856, and the route was surveyed by George Sanders to plans drawn up by McClean and his assistant, Frank Stileman.

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