Hartington Station sited across the boundaries of Hartington Town Quarter and Hartington Nether Quarter Parish Councils At the time Hartington Station was constructed at the close of the nineteenth century, its builder, the London and North-western Railway Company [LNWR] was regarded as the ‘Premier Line’, the greatest railway enterprise in the country. So why did it bother with the insertion of thirteen miles of rural track between Parsley Hay and Ashbourne? Primarily it was because the LNWR regarded it as a ‘missing link’ in its desire to provide a competitive alternative route between Manchester and London, via Buxton, Ashbourne and Uttoxeter, helping to alleviate the pressure on the ever-busier existing lines between the two great cities; local traffic was very much a secondary objective.

It is a curiosity that a station was built at Hartington, almost two miles from the village, but not at Biggin, where the line passed close by. Biggin was a smaller settlement in 1899 than it is today but a station was improbably provided for the even tinier community of Alsop-en-le-Dale; the LNWR probably had an eye on developing tourism in nearby Dovedale and serving the larger settlement of Alstonefield which, like Hartington, lay about two miles away. Whatever the reasons, Hartington was quite a grand example of rural station architecture, soundly constructed with, for example, Canadian Red Cedar timber for the platforms. The picture displays its resplendent character on the line’s opening day, 1^st August, 1899. The gentleman stood beside his personal saloon carriage  was Francis William Webb, the LNWR Company’s Chief Mechanical Engineer and Locomotive Superintendent. This distinguished gentleman is in the other picture [the one of the opening day party], slightly standing out from the crowd on the extreme right in his natty waistcoat and distinctive top hat [most photographs of F. W. Webb, over many years, seem to feature the very same hat].