The Willington excavation report's own authors decline to claim the site as the standard gauge's origin, pointing instead to an earlier, unexcavated line via Heaton Banks colliery

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The popular framing built on this excavation — the 2017 Tyne & Wear Archives & Museums blog post behind claim-willington-waggonway-1785-excavation-claims-full-gauge-predates-stephenson — states flatly that the Willington Waggonway's gauge "set the gauge for the Killingworth Waggonway and ultimately the rest of the world." The excavation report itself is more guarded. In the closing passage of its site-chronology narrative (the "Phase 5: Abandonment" section, immediately before the Conclusions heading), describing the network of lines converging near the site, Richard Carlton and Alan Williams write that the Kenton and Coxlodge line ran "via the Heaton Banks colliery, where the origins of the standard gauge seem to lie earlier in the 18th century" — the report's own authors locating the likely origin point of the standard gauge at a different, older colliery line than the one they excavated, hedged with "seem to," not asserted as established fact. Heaton Banks and this earlier line were not excavated as part of this project, and the report does not date or measure them directly.

This means the report is considerably more cautious about the causal "Willington set the standard" story than the promotional material drawn from it — it gestures toward a still-unverified older origin point rather than claiming the distinction for its own 1785 find. It narrows what claim-willington-waggonway-1785-excavation-claims-full-gauge-predates-stephenson can be read to establish: even if Willington's own measured gauge holds up, the report that discovered it does not claim Willington is where the standard gauge began.