It’s been a busy weekend! 🌱
With our volunteers and the Whitley Bay Community Clean Team removing rubbish, cutting grass and trimming hedges. All ready for our first running weekend!

About
Heritage train rides are back on track at Stephenson!

Take a four mile return trip (35-40 minutes) following the route of the coal trains from the collieries to the River Tyne behind a vintage locomotive in our 1950s passenger carriages.

Before or after your train ride, why not explore the museum and discover the fascinating displays and interpretation of our collections. Don’t forget to say hello to Killingworth Billy, the world’s third oldest steam locomotive!

The shop is open for railway-related books and souvenirs, and our Waggonway Tea Room will be serving a limited range of hot and cold drinks, snacks and cakes.

Please note that heritage train rides are subject to the availability of volunteer crew.

Book now.

Visitor Information
Museum opening times vary each day:

Non-train running days: 11am-4pm

Train running days: 30 minutes before the first train departures. Please check Ticketsource for train running times.

We regret that currently we are unable to offer wheelchair access to our carriages as the door openings are restricted to 55cm. Wheelchair users must be able to self-transfer onto the passenger carriages to ride on our heritage trains. As a heritage railway, we are exempt from certain aspects of the Equality Act. For further help or information, please visit our access information page.

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This event is part of our Ways to Play programme of free and low-cost family-friendly activities.

Make your ‘Ways to Play’ adventure a great value day out by travelling to our venues by the Metro and / or Ferry.

Up to three children aged 11 and under can travel for free on the Metro and the Shields Ferry with a fare-paying adult. Metro is the convenient, fast and frequent way to get to your favourite attractions and now it’s even more affordable.

Louis created the ‘Alice Network’ an organisation to manage female spies.

The word conjures up images of James Bond villainesses in slinky dresses, purring double-edged one-liners through a haze of cigarette smoke as they coax information out of their helpless marks. Spying wasn’t really perceived as glamorous until after the Bond myth took hold, but women have always been essential parts of the intelligence business, simply because women could often eavesdrop, run messages, or pass information without being noticed and suspected as men would have been. World War I’s most successful spy ring was called the Alice Network, and it was run by a woman. Her name was Louise de Bettignies, and she was known as the Queen of Spies.

Louise was born to an impoverished manufacturing family in France. Well-educated and multi-lingual, she took the Jane Eyre option like many educated-but-broke women of the day, and supported herself as a governess for various noble European families. Louise was in France when war broke out, and on a visit to England soon afterward she was recruited by British intelligence, who were not slow to notice her quick wits and her fluency in French, German, and English. Louise returned to northern France, now occupied by the Germans, and quickly set up a network of sources throughout the region: men, women, and even children who would collect information on the enemy, everything from troop numbers to train schedules to artillery placements. Louise, on the move constantly through the region, compiled her sources’ information into reports which she passed back to England.

The risks were appalling. The Germans did not hesitate to shoot those suspected of espionage, and mounted frequent checkpoints to catch spies. Louise employed a handful of differing identities, passing across borders with coded messages hidden in a variety of ingenius ways: between the pages of a magazine, rolled up inside shoe heels or umbrella staffs, wrapped around hairpins or the band of a ring. She knew exactly how to play the guards, whether by playing the witless female chattering gossip, or whether taking so long to fuss with an armload of packages that she was waved through in exasperation without being checked further. “They are too stupid,” she once laughed. “With any paper one sticks under their nose and plenty of self-possession, one can get through.” Louise also crossed borders on foot and in stealth when necessary, making grueling nighttime hikes across heavily mined and search-lighted borders already littered with the bodies of refugees who had not made it to safety. Even when she saw a fleeing pair blow up before her eyes as they stepped on a mine, Louise remained undeterred from her work. Her poise, humor, and way of shrugging off peril was remarkable. “Bah! I know I’ll be caught one day, but I shall have served. Let us hurry, and do great things while there is yet time.”

Her efforts paid off: her network was astoundingly successful, her intelligence so reliable and so fast-moving that British military men gushed like teenage girls at One Direction concert. They called Louise de Bettignies “A really high-class agent” and wrote “I cannot speak too highly of the bravery, devotion, and patriotism of this young lady.” And Louise was not the only woman facing incredible danger to serve her country in the war. Red Cross nurse Edith Cavell smuggled many wounded French and English soldiers to safety from Belgium; young Gabrielle Petit led downed pilots from behind enemy lines; a Belgian vicomtesse ran a successful organization for passing information and people into the Netherlands. And ordinary women risked themselves, too, like the teenaged Aurelie le Four who worked for the Alice Network as a local guide for Louise’s spies.

The price that was paid for such courage could be horrifying. Edith Cavell and Gabrielle Petit were arrested, condemned for espionage, and shot by firing squad. The vicomtesse was arrested and spent three grueling years in Siegburg prison. Young Aurelie le Four was raped by German soldiers when returning from guide duty after curfew, but still continued to serve the Alice Network . . . and when she became a nun after World War I, she was still standing up to German soldiers thirty years later, when the next war came to her doorstep looking for the Jewish children under her care. Courage continued undaunted, from the Queen of Spies to even the youngest of her couriers.