Audio guides are available for secondary groups. We’re happy to discuss your requirements. You can also visit Leawood Pumphouse with your school group. Part of the route included the Hopton Incline. This was a very steep section of the railway about a mile north of the small village of Hopton. It was originally worked by a stationary steam engine but was modified later to be adhesion worked by locomotives. At 1 in 14 (7%), it was the steepest in Britain and trains frequently had to be split and pulled up a few wagons at a time. Half-a-mile long, the Burbage tunnel is the only one on the High Peak Railway of any importance, and it is dirty enough and wet enough for them all. This locomotive was built in 1877 for the LNWR and it is seen here hauling a goods train between Sheep Pasture Top and Middleton Bottom. Low’ in the Peak district means ‘high’; and the quaint old Derbyshire people describe a residence in there exposed altitudes as ‘living out of doors’. Hurdlow is the succeeding station (‘low’ again, you see); and this is the highest point of the High Peak Line.

Traffic – by now almost exclusively from local quarries – was slowly decreasing during the Beeching era, the first section of the line being closed in 1963. This was the rope worked 1 in 8 Middleton Incline. The rest of the line was fully closed in spring 1967, including the 1 in 8 Sheep Pasture Incline and the Hopton Incline.The driver cannot start without this staff, which he receives from the official in charge of the staff station; and on arriving at the station to which the staff extends, the talisman is given up to the person conducting that place. The boiler is of the ordinary tubular construction, and presents no novelty except that of being made wholly of wrought iron, tubes included. The engine differs in some respects from others

Finally Josias Jessop, the son of William Jessop, was asked to survey the route. He, his father and their former partner Benjamin Outram had gained wide experience in building tramways where conditions were unsuitable for canals, and that is what he suggested. Even so, as almost the first long-distance line at 33 miles (53km), it was a bold venture. Moreover, to its summit at Ladmanlow, it would climb a thousand feet from Cromford, making it one of the highest lines ever built in Britain.Another locomotive to take the train to High Peak Junction at Whatstandwel. The unique ‘Oozly bird’* came over to this country, it is well known, in two ships; but to get over the High Peak Line involves at least half-a-dozen locomotives.