Sir Arthur Percival Heywood, 3rd Baronet (25 December 1849 – 19 April 1916) is best known today as the innovator of the fifteen-inch minimum-gauge railway, for estate use.

He was the eldest son of Sir Thomas Percival Heywood and grew up in the family home of Dove Leys at Denstone in Staffordshire.

He assisted his father in his hobby of ornamental metalwork, with a Holtzapffel lathe, and in his late teenage, built a 4 in gauge model railway with a steam locomotive.

Initially schooled at Eton, in 1868, he went on to Trinity College, Cambridge,[1] where he made friends with the local railway people, cadging lifts on the footplates of locos.

The Heywood family originally made its fortune in the trans-Atlantic slavery trade, which operated in Liverpool, and as a landed gentleman, however, convention frowned on him developing an engineering career.

[2] Sir Arthur's father died in 1897 and he inherited Dove Leys, where he began to build another railway between the road, where there was a coal store, and the house.

His intention was to extend to Norbury railway goods yard, but Colonel Clowes who owned the land in between refused to give him wayleave.

Sir Arthur then extended the line southwards to nearby Dove Cliff farm, which was part of his estate, and thence to Rocester station.