The railway, which was completed in 1831, was built to carry minerals and goods through the hilly rural terrain of the Peak District within Derbyshire, England.

The remains of the line, between Dowlow and Cromford, has now become the High Peak Trail, a route on the National Cycle Network.

The Peak District of Derbyshire has always posed problems for travel, but from 1800 when the Peak Forest Canal was built, an alternative to the long route through the Trent and Mersey Canal was sought, not only for minerals and finished goods to Manchester, but raw cotton for the East Midlands textile industry.

In 1810, a prospectus was published for another route via Grindleford, Hope and Edale, but since it could only promise £6,000 a year, in return for an outlay of £500,000, it was received with little enthusiasm.

The problem was not only carrying a canal over a height of around a thousand feet, but supplying it with water on the dry limestone uplands.

He, his father and their former partner Benjamin Outram had gained wide experience in building tramways where conditions were unsuitable for canals, and that is what he suggested.

Moreover, to its summit at Ladmanlow, it would climb a thousand feet from Cromford, making it one of the highest lines ever built in Britain.

4. c. xxx) was obtained for a "railway or tramroad" to be propelled by "stationary or locomotive steam engines," which was remarkably prescient, considering few people considered steam locomotives to be feasible, and George Stephenson's Stockton and Darlington Railway was barely open in far-away County Durham.

The first part of the line from the wharf at High Peak Junction, on the Cromford Canal, to Hurdlow opened in 1830.

The railway was laid using so-called "fishbelly" rails supported on stone blocks, as was common in those days, rather than timber sleepers, since it would be powered by horses on the flat sections.

While its function was to provide a shorter route for Derbyshire coal than the Trent and Mersey Canal, it figured largely in early East Midlands railway schemes because it was seen as offering a path into Manchester for proposed lines from London.

Towards the Whaley Bridge end of the line, another profusion of sidings lay between Dowlow Halt and Ladmanlow, mostly serving quarries and limeworks.

Not only did the C&HPR have the steepest adhesion worked incline of any line in the country, the 1 in 14 of Hopton, it also had the sharpest curve, 55 yards (50 m) radius through eighty degrees at Gotham.

The old north end of the line from Ladmanlow (a short distance from Harpur Hill) to Whaley Bridge via the Goyt Valley was largely abandoned in 1892, though the track bed is still visible in many places and one incline forms part of a public road.

Francis Wright, the Chairman, was later to say, in 1862 "We found ourselves getting into difficulties from the third year of our existence," and added it was clear in retrospect that the line "never had a remote chance of paying a dividend on the original shares.

The line was fairly level on the approach to the Hopton Incline and it was custom to gain speed for the uphill gradient.

During World War II, the line was used to transport bombs to the large underground munitions store at RAF Harpur Hill.

[13] Traffic – by now almost exclusively from local quarries – was slowly decreasing during the Beeching era, the first section of the line being closed in 1963.