bart. Sir Arthur Percival Heywood

Born in 1849, Sir Arthur Percival Heywood was an English landowner, engineer, and the 3rd Baronet Heywood. He is most closely linked with the Duffield Bank Railway, a private line he built on his estate in Derbyshire, where he tested ideas about how lightweight railways could move people and goods efficiently.

Heywood became an important early advocate of minimum-gauge railways. Rather than treating tiny railways as toys, he argued that they could be practical and economical when carefully designed. He developed locomotives and rolling stock for this purpose and later set out his ideas in Minimum Gauge Railways.

Although his railway was private, its influence reached far beyond his estate. His work helped inspire later generations interested in narrow-gauge and estate railways, and he remains a notable figure in railway history for turning experiment into working practice.