The details of the working were gradually perfected by experience, the projectors of the line being scarcely conscious at first of the importance and significance of the work which they had taken in hand, and little thinking that they were laying the foundations of a system which was yet to revolutionise the internal communications of the world, and confer the greatest blessings on mankind. It is important to note that the commercial results of the enterprise were considered satisfactory from the opening of the railway. Besides conferring a great public benefit upon the inhabitants of the district and throwing open entirely new markets for coal, the profits derived from the traffic created by the railway yielded increasing dividends to those who had risked their capital in the undertaking, and thus held forth an encouragement to the projectors of railways generally, which was not without an important effect in stimulating the projection of similar enterprises in other districts. These results, as displayed in the annual dividends, must have been eminently encouraging to the astute commercial men of Liverpool and Manchester, who were then engaged in the prosecution of their railway. Indeed, the commercial success of the Stockton and Darlington Company may be justly characterised as the turning-point of the railway system. Before leaving this subject, we cannot avoid alluding to one of its most remarkable and direct results—the creation of the town of Middlesborough-on-Tees. When the railway was opened in 1825, the site of this future metropolis of Cleveland was occupied by one solitary farmhouse and its outbuildings. All round was pasture-land or mud-banks; scarcely another house was within sight. In 1829 some of the principal proprietors of the railway joined in the purchase of about 500 or 600 acres of land five miles below Stockton—the site of the modern Middlesborough—for the purpose of there forming a new seaport for the shipment of coals brought to the Tees by the railway. The line was accordingly extended thither; docks were excavated; a town sprang up; churches, chapels, and schools were built, with a custom-house, mechanics’ institute, banks, shipbuilding yards, and iron-factories. In ten years a busy population of some 6000 persons (since increased to about 23,000) occupied the site of the original farmhouse. {144} More recently, the discovery of vast stores of ironstone in the Cleveland Hills, closely adjoining Middlesborough, has tended still more rapidly to augment the population and increase the commercial importance of the place.