The Willington excavation report never engages with the 'belated 1829 half-inch' account, leaving the vault's Willington/Stephenson contradiction unreconciled by the primary source

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Nothing in the Carlton & Williams excavation chapter (pp. 8–73: construction history, gauge measurements, site chronology, Conclusions), read directly and in full, mentions George Stephenson's Liverpool & Manchester line, the year 1829, or the "why he added the additional ½ inch... is a mystery" account carried by Mosaic Projects and Wikipedia via Adrian Vaughan (see claim-stephensons-4ft8in-gauge-predates-1829-only-final-halfinch-dated-there). Its closest approaches are indirect: the Conclusions cite "the association of the Killingworth line with the origin of the standard gauge," and the Phase 5 narrative points to Heaton Banks (see claim-willington-excavators-decline-origin-claim-point-to-heaton-banks). One important scope limit, recorded on audit: the PDF read here contains only the opening page (p. 73) of Les Turnbull's companion historical chapter — the volume's pagination jumps from there to the glossary and bibliography (pp. 186–189) — and that single page already invokes "a curious accident which linked the line to George Stephenson, the standard gauge." So the silence established here is the excavation chapter's, not the whole volume's: Turnbull's full, unread chapter is exactly where the volume would engage the Stephenson connection, and this note cannot say whether it does.

question-verify-willington-waggonway-1785-excavation-report asked whether this report would reconcile claim-willington-waggonway-1785-excavation-claims-full-gauge-predates-stephenson against the "belated half-inch" account. From the pages available it cannot be answered as a clean reconciliation: the excavation chapter neither confirms nor refutes the belated-half-inch account, because it never addresses it — though Turnbull's full chapter (not in the PDF read here) remains an open route to an answer. What direct reading of the primary source adds is that it is more internally divided and more hedged about causation (see claim-willington-report-main-line-stated-four-foot-eight-inch-no-half-inch and claim-willington-excavators-decline-origin-claim-point-to-heaton-banks) than either side of the existing vault contradiction assumed — sharpening the disagreement rather than settling it.