Indentured in England, Whitton gained extensive railway engineering experience prior to his arrival in the Colony of New South Wales in 1856.

[3] Appointed in March 1856 as Engineer-in-Charge, Whitton arrived in Sydney and found the Colony with 23 miles (37 km) of 4 ft 8+1⁄2 in (1,435 mm) standard gauge railway, four locomotives, 12 passenger carriages and 40 trucks.

An advocate of the 5 ft 3 in (1,600 mm) broad gauge adopted by the South Australian and Victorian Railways, Whitton set about extending the railway into the city and resisted pushes for 4,000 miles (6,400 km) of cheaper, light tramways, such as horse-drawn lines with wooden rails, proposed by Governor William Denison.

A royal commission into railway bridges exonerated Whitton of the charges of faulty design and of using inferior materials.

He had supervised the laying of 2,171 miles (3,494 km) of the track on which no accident had occurred attributable to defective design or construction.

[7] Whitton was survived by his wife, one son and two daughters, he died of cardiac disease on 20 February 1898 at Mittagong, and was buried in the cemetery of St Thomas' Anglican Church, North Sydney.

The town of Whitton in Leeton Shire, where the Hay extension of the Great Southern Line reached in 1881, is named in honour.

[2] In 2009 a rail activist group proposed the establishment of the Whitton Line, running from Port Macquarie to Albury via Narrabri, Dubbo, and Griffith.