This route was built to give the Derwent Iron Company a southward outlet for its works at Consett – it included a rope-worked incline at Sunnyside and began to carry passenger traffic in 1847, which was also the year that the WXR was amalgamated with the BA&WR.

[1] This only had the one (reversible) platform on a loop off the main line – a configuration that was used in several other locations on the S&D system (e.g. North Road, Redcar Central and Bishop Auckland itself), with a sizeable goods yard nearby that served the adjacent Pease's West Colliery, coke ovens, fire clay works and chemical plant.

This led to a number of infrastructure improvements on the route, including the replacement of the Sunnyside incline with a less-steeply graded deviation along with new station at Tow Law from 2 March 1868 and the commissioning of a connection onto the recently opened Derwent Valley Line near Blackhill that gave access to Newcastle Central on 6 May the same year.

Passenger traffic on the thinly-populated part of the route north of Tow Law was never particularly plentiful (especially after the decline of industrial activity in the area from the early 1930s onwards) and services from there through to Blackhill were withdrawn by the LNER on 1 May 1939.

These went over to Diesel Multiple Unit operation in 1958 (along with most routes in the area) and whilst this initially led to an increase in passenger numbers, the station was still one of those listed for closure in Richard Beeching's 1963 Reshaping of British Railways report.