WHEN Locomotion No 1 first came rattling across the south Durham countryside 196 years ago, it passed over a lonely road that joined Middleton One Row with Sadberge and dropped a little coal there so people could cart it off to their homes.

Very quickly, by 1829, 1,000 tons of coal a year was being delivered at Fighting Cocks along with 1,000 tons of lime and coal.

The junction took its name from the emblem of the Cocks family whose descendants, the Killinghalls and the Pembertons, had owned the area for 600 years.

The hard-working shovellers at Fighting Cocks coal drop needed refreshments and so an enterprising farmer, William Woodhouse of Palm Tree House, began providing the required liquor.

Such was the initial success of the railway, in 1830-31, a “cottage for the accommodation of passengers and parcels and the sale of coals, lime etc” was built at the junction. The cottage was called Railway Lodge, but we today would understand it as “a railway station”.

Squire Henry Cocks must have seen the economic potential of shovellers, railwaymen and passengers all hanging around thirstily at the “station”, and so shortly after 1832, he built an inn next to the coal depot. Mary Woodhouse, the wife of the Palm Tree farmer, was its earliest licensee. It is the fate of this historic inn, with its connection back to the earliest days of the railways, that Darlington councillors have been discussing.

It isn’t known precisely when the inn opened, although there are newspaper reports from May and June 1834 telling how “some daring thieves” had broken into the barn beside the Fighting Cocks inn and stolen “6 pokes, containing 12 bushels of red wheat”. The man found guilty of the crime had two previous convictions and so was transported to Australia for seven years.

Because of the success of the railway, the services at Fighting Cocks evolved and grew. The coal depot was enlarged to 12 cells; in the 1860s, Railway Lodge was rebuilt as a proper station, called Fighting Cocks; over the course of the 19th Century, the inn itself was extended and enlarged while clay pits and brickworks opened around it and a windmill sprung up nearby.

Then, in 1864, Squire Cocks had another brainwave: he realised that his inn was midway between the coalpits of south Durham and the iron ore mines of the Cleveland Hills. So he split the distance and opened his own blast furnace in the middle at Middleton St George.

Within two decades, there were six blast furnaces burning night and day in his ironworks. It employed 300 men, largely Irish immigrants, and a village of 1,100 inhabitants - the modern Middleton St George - had sprung up around it.

But as soon as the industrial flower of Fighting Cocks had bloomed, so it began to wither. In 1887, a new loop line was opened into Bank Top station running through the new Dinsdale station, less than a mile south of Fighting Cocks. The old line, depot and station had their status downgraded and only handled goods until complete closure in 1964.

The inn was therefore left to fend for itself, as a reminder of the birth of the railways and the development of rail services - a story Darlington is uniquely placed to tell, but only if it takes care of its historic assets.