Shotton Bridge railway station was a railway station built by the North Eastern Railway (NER) on the route of the Hartlepool Dock & Railway (HD&R) as part of a programme of works to modernise that line and link it with the Durham & Sunderland Railway (D&SR) so as to create a railway through-route between West Hartlepool and Sunderland. On opening, the station served the relatively new village of Shotton Colliery, which grew around the nearby Shotton Grange Colliery, as well as Old Shotton on the Stockton to Sunderland turnpike road, further to the east. History The Hartlepool Dock & Railway Construction of the HD&R was first authorised by an Act of Parliament obtained on 1 June 1832 which granted the railway company powers to construct a 14-mile railway from Moorsley (near Houghton-le-Spring) to Hartlepool, as well as a number of short branches to serve collieries surrounding the line. A further Act of 16 June 1834 authorised an additional branch to Gilesgate in the City of Durham. However competition from other railway companies (most notably the Durham & Sunderland Railway (D&SR)) diverted along other routes much of the traffic that the company had been intending to access thus meaning that the H&DR only reached as far as and most of its branches were either cut short or left unbuilt. Nonetheless, the curtailed line opened (as far as Haswell) on 23 November 1835. Passenger services were operated over the line but no station was initially provided at Shotton: the nearest station at the time was . The most likely reason that no station was provided here when the line first opened in 1835 is that the area was then rural: the line passed some distance from Old Shotton and the fairly deep Permian Magnesian Limestone overlying Carboniferous Coal Measures meant that large-scale mining activity had yet to begin in the area. Sinking of Shotton Grange Colliery began in 1840 and once in production it was linked first to the southbound H&DR route by the Shotton Wagonway and soon afterwards, in 1841, to the northbound Pesspool Branch of the South Hetton Railway. The NER and the opening of the station In 1846, the newly formed York & Newcastle Railway (Y&NR) took out a lease on the HD&R which was ratified by an Act of 22 July 1848, from which point the line was operated by the York, Newcastle & Berwick Railway (YN&BR) (the