The first Stockton and Darlington Act gave permission to all parties to
use the line on payment of certain rates. Thus private individuals might
work their own horses and carriages upon the railway and be their own
carriers. Mr. Clepham, in the _Gateshead Observer_, gives an interesting
account of the competition induced by the system:—“There were two
separate coach companies in Stockton, and amusing collisions sometimes
occurred between the drivers—who found on the rail a novel element for
contention. Coaches cannot pass each other on the rail as on the road;
and at the more westward public-house in Stockton (the Bay Horse, kept by
Joe Buckton), the coach was always on the line betimes, reducing its
eastward rival to the necessity of waiting patiently (or impatiently) in
the rear. The line was single, with four sidings in the mile; and when
two coaches met, or two trains, or coach and train, the question arose
which of the drivers must go back? This was not always settled in
silence. As to trains, it came to be a sort of understanding that light
wagons should give way to loaded; as to trains and coaches, that the
passengers should have preference over coals; while coaches, when they
met, must quarrel it out. At length, midway between sidings a post was
erected, and a rule was laid down that he who had passed the pillar must
go on, and the coming man go back. At the Goose Pool and Early Nook, it
was common for these coaches to stop; and there, as Jonathan would say,
passengers and coachmen ‘liquored.’ One coach, introduced by an
innkeeper, was a compound of two mourning coaches, an approximation to
the real railway coach, which still adheres, with multiplying exceptions,
to the stage coach type. One Dixon, who drove the ‘Experiment’ between
Darlington and Shildon, is the inventor of carriage lighting on the rail.
On a dark winter night, having compassion on his passengers, he would buy
a penny candle, and place it lighted amongst them, on the table of the
‘Experiment’—the first railway coach (which, by the way, ended its days
at Shildon, as a railway cabin), being also the first coach on the rail
(first, second, and third class jammed all into one) that indulged its
customers with light in darkness.”