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This was the year that the very first passenger carrying steam train ran between Darlington and Stockton. The engine of the train was designed by a man called George Stephenson who is often said to be the father of the railways.
However, it wasn't actually Stephenson who built the very first steam locomotive. That honour went to a Cornish engineer called Richard Trevithick. The old steam engines, as we wrote about last century, were massive devices and used low pressure steam, partly because James Watt, the inventor, thought “strong steam”, or high pressure steam, was too dangerous. Trevithick thought differently. He understood that by using high-pressure steam and allowing it to expand within the cylinder, a much smaller and lighter engine could be built without any less power than in the low-pressure type.
Trevithick built his first steam carriage, which he drove up a hill in Camborne, Cornwall, on Christma Eve 1801. In 1803 he built a second carriage, which he drove through the streets of London, and constructed the world’s first steam railway locomotive at a factory in South Wales. On February 21, 1804, that engine won a bet by hauling a load of 10 tons of iron and 70 men along 10 miles of tramway. A second, similar locomotive was built at Gateshead in 1805, and in 1808 Trevithick demonstrated a third, the Catch-me-who-can, on a circular track laid near Euston Road in London. He then abandoned these projects, because the cast-iron rails proved too brittle for the weight of his engines.
After that things went downhill for Mr Trevithick. He joined up with an untrustworthy business partner and in 1811 he was declared bankrupt. Then some silver mines in Peru ordered some of his engines so in 1816 he sailed for South America. He returned to England in 1827, penniless and died in 1833 in Dartford, Kent, where he was buried in an unmarked grave.
Meanwhile, though, others had been busy, notable George Stephenson. Without any formal schooling, please note, he started work in a coal mine in Newcastle-upon-Tyne and by the age of 19, in 1801, was operating a steam engine, one of the big, low pressure ones, to pump out water from the mine.
In 1813 he visited a neighbouring colliery to examine a “steam boiler on wheels”. However, to make it work, it had a ratchet wheel which engaged with cogs on a third rail. Stephenson thought he could do better and he was right because he then designed an engine which used just two rails to run on and pulled eight loaded wagons carrying 30 tons of coal at 4 miles (6 km) per hour.
Over the next years he continued developing his engines but then he heard about a proposed railway between Stockton and Darlington. They were going to use horses to pull the carriages but Stephenson convinced them to let him build a steam locomotive for the line. The first train ran, possibly on time, in 1825, pulling carriages containing 450 people at 15 mph or 24 kph.
Next Stephenson was contacted by the cities of Liverpool and Manchester who wanted to build a 40 mile, or 64 kilometre, railway to connect them. Stephenson, now working with his son Robert, designed a new engine, called the rocket. It proved well-named as it was able to travel at 36 mph (54 kph) and these were the engines used when the line opened on September 15, 1830. Eight engines were used and all of them had been built in Stephenson’s Newcastle works.
Sadly, on the day the railway opened, there also occurred the first train death. A man called William Huskisson, an MP and railway enthusiast, got a bit carried away and failed to notice an engine was approaching as he stood talking. It hit him and he fell to the ground. He was then carried away again but this time in one of the carriages. He died soon afterwards and there is a memorial to him near where he was hit.
George Stephenson continued to be involved in railways for the rest of his life, not only in designing the engines but also solving problems of railway construction and such things as bridge design and viaduct building. He died in 1848.
Funnily enough, one of the objections farmers had about railways running across their land was not the pollution from the steam, not the great metal tracks ruining the countryside but the fact that if horse drawn transport ended, there would be no market for the oats that many of them were growing.
Forward to 1829AD
