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  One way of avoiding this alarming situation was to control the movement by cable and drum, with the added advantage that if two tracks were built, the weight of the full trucks going down could be used to lift the empties back up again. This was fine as long as the tramways were always working downhill, but it was clear that the problem could be overcome by combining winding drum and stationary steam engine. So it was that in many mines, men became used to working with the new machines, whether pumping water from the pit, raising and lowering men and materials, or acting as a motive power for the trucks of a tramway system. These were not ‘educated men’ in the conventional sense – such education as they had came from practical experience. They were often openly scornful of the advantages of any other form of education, no matter how grand they themselves were: the great civil engineer John Rennie declared that ‘after a young man has been three or four years at the University of Oxford or Cambridge, he cannot, without much difficulty turn himself to the practical part of civil engineering’. Rennie might have taken a more charitable view of the French engineering school, but there was still nothing of the sort to be found in Britain. The future of the steam railway was to lie in the hands of men such as George Stephenson, who received no formal schooling at all and started his working life at the age of eight. Stephenson, however, was by no means the first in the field of steam locomotion. That story really begins in 1800.

  In 1800 the Boulton and Watt patent at last expired and the way to experimentation lay officially open. Nowhere was the news greeted with more enthusiasm than among the tin and copper mines of Cornwall. With no local source of fuel, they were desperate to find more efficient ways of using steam than those offered by Watt and his condenser. One answer was ‘strong steam’, or high-pressure steam, and there was no more enthusiastic advocate than the young son of a mine ‘captain’, Richard Trevithick. He was twenty-six years old when he began his experiments in 1797, and he was soon trying out his first road locomotive. On Christmas Eve 1801 his little engine successfully pulled a party of local worthies up a hill near Camborne. “Old Stephen Williams” gave this first hand account: “Captain Dick [Trevithick] got up steam, out in the high-road, just outside the shop on the Weith. When we get see’d that Captain Dick was agoing to turn on steam, we jumped up as many as we could, may be seven or eight of us. ‘Twas a stiffish hill going from the Weith up to Camborne Beacon, but she went off like a little bird.

  Richard Trevithick, the Cornish engineer who built the first steam locomotive to run on rails.

  When she had gone about a quarter of a mile, there was a roughish piece of road with loose stones, she didn’t go quite so fast, and as it was a flood of rain, and we were very squeezed together, I jumped off. She was going faster than I could walk.” It was a great success – up to a point. On a second excursion on Boxing Day, the engine hit a gulley and the steering mechanism was damaged. His companion Davies Gilbert related what happened next: ‘The carriage was forced under some shelter, and the Partners adjourned to the Hotel, & comforted their hearts with a Roast Goose and proper drinks, when, forget-full of the Engine, its Water boiled away, the Iron became red hot, and nothing that was combustible remained either of the Engine or the house.’

  Trevithick continued despite this somewhat inauspicious beginning, and built another road engine which trundled around the streets of London, without it appears exciting any enthusiasm in anyone. It is interesting, if no more, to think what the future of transport might have been had the road engine been a success. Trevithick was not a man temperamentally inclined, however, to dwell on failures or to pursue his notions beyond what he considered a reasonable distance. He paid a visit to Coalbrookdale, with its extensive tramway, and there it seems possible that he made tentative experiments in putting his steam locomotive on rails. But the great event finally occurred in 1804.

  Trevithick’s 1803 engine: The replica seen at the Blister Hill Museum was successfully tested on the Penydarren tramway in South Wales in 1804. He was unsuccessful in getting his engines accepted, mainly because they broke the brittle cast iron rails.

  Trevithick had sold a share of his patent in the road locomotive to a Welsh ironmaster, Samuel Homfray. Partly to publicize the engine, and partly because it seemed a good bet anyway, Homfray made a wager of 500 guineas that the locomotive could haul a load of 10 tons along the Penydarren tramway that ran from a point near Merthyr Tydfil for nearly 10 miles to Abercynon and the Glamorgan Canal. It is still possible to walk much of the route of the old line, where lines of stone sleeper blocks lie embedded in the ground, and imagine the scene when the tiny locomotive came panting its way up the lonely valley of the River Taff. Gilbert again was on hand to record the event.

  Yesterday we proceeded on our journey with the engine; we carry’d ten tons of Iron, five waggons, and 70 men riding on them the whole of the journey. Its about nine miles which we perform’d in 4 hours & 5 Mints [sic], but we had to cut down some trees and remove some large rocks out of the road.

  The engine was a success: the railway was not. The cast-iron rails cracked under the weight of the engine, which rather spoiled the experiment. In many ways the Penydarren engine showed its pioneering nature in devices such as the huge cumbersome flywheel; in other ways it was to foreshadow later developments. The exhaust steam was turned up the chimney to increase the blast to the fire, a device that was to be reinvented by Robert Stephenson a decade later. Trevithick was able to sell one of his locomotives to the collieries of the north-east, but the Wylam tramway proved as inappropriate as the Penydarren for taking the weight and force of a locomotive. The engine suffered the indignity of being taken off its wheels and used as a primitive stationary engine. Trevithick was to make one last bid to get publicity for his invention, by running an engine round a circular track near the site of the present Euston station. ‘Catch-me-who-can’, as it was called, was unfortunately looked on more as an amusing side-show exhibit than a serious form of transport. The world did not rush to Trevithick’s door demanding steam locomotives, and he turned his inventive genius to other applications of high-pressure steam. It was not quite the end of Richard Trevithick’s involvement with railways and steam locomotives. The world did at least recognize him as a master of steam and he was recruited to build engines for the silver mines of Peru in 1816. He had years of great success, but then war ravished the industry and he reached Cartagena on his way home in 1827, an impoverished, but far from broken man. There he met a young Englishman, whom he had dandled on his knee when he had taken his colliery engine to Tyneside, Robert Stephenson. Trevithick was returning to an uncertain future; Stephenson was going home to work on the great Liverpool & Manchester Railway. There can scarcely have been a more poignantly symbolic moment than this: the young man who was shortly to design the Rocket had to lend the inventor of the steam locomotive £50 to get home. It might have been a consolation to know that future Trevithicks were to be among the band of engineers who were to go on to build railways for the world.

  Steam locomotive development was undoubtedly held back by the brittle cast-iron track. In 1808 John Blenkinsop took over a colliery near Leeds and one of the problems he faced was the high cost of getting coal from pit head to the River Aire. The cost of fodder during the Napoleonic Wars made horse transport on the Middleton Colliery railway very expensive and Blenkinsop favoured steam – but what to do about the broken rails? He took the problem to a local engineer, Matthew Murray, whose enthusiasm for steam was well known – his house was even called Steam Hall. He realized that only by building a lighter engine could the permanent way be saved from breaking up every time a train passed over it. But light engines could not pull heavy loads. The answer was to find a way of increasing the tractive power. He designed a rack-and-pinion engine, of the sort still used on mountain railways throughout the world. It was suggested by some later commentators that Murray believed smooth wheels would slip on smooth rails but this was never the case. What Murray came up with was a practical solutio
n to a very real problem. The 5-ton engine could haul around 15 tons without the rack-and-pinion – with it the load went up to 90 tons, and no smashed rails.

  The Middleton Colliery Railway was a triumph. Thousands came to see it run, but more importantly a regular service was in operation by 1812 with two locomotives. Two more were added the following year. This was no gimmick, but a genuine commercial steam railway. It attracted immense interest and not just from local sightseers. George Stephenson came down from Tyneside to take a look in 1813, and the next year he built his very own first locomotive for Killingworth colliery. It cannot be pure coincidence that the main dimensions – piston diameter, stroke, boiler size, flue diameter – were virtually the same in the Murray and the Stephenson engine. And now, for the very first time, the wider world began to pay attention. Grand Duke Nicholas of Russia, soon to become Emperor, made the pilgrimage to the Yorkshire colliery in 1816 and according to local reports showed a ‘curious appreciation and an expression of no small admiration’. But already the Middleton Railway had become obsolete, overtaken by an improvement in rail technology which had made heavier locomotives viable and the rack-and-pinion redundant.

  Early locomotive development now became centred on the collieries of the north-east. There were a good many developments between the years 1813 and 1815, with numerous engineers putting forward ideas, but for the next decade there was only one man in England, or indeed the world, actively engaged in designing and building locomotives, George Stephenson. He received some encouragement. One fanatical railway prophet was Thomas Gray of Nottingham, regarded by some of his contemporaries as certifiably lunatic. He actually suggested covering the whole country with a network of railways carrying freight and, even more astonishingly, passengers. His book of 1818, Observations on a General Iron-Railway, has a frontispiece showing a Murray-type locomotive chuffing along with what can only be called three stage coaches, complete with horn-tooting postilions. His vision was neatly expressed in a short verse on the title page.

  No speed with this, can swiftest horse compare;

  No weight like this, canal or vessel bear

  As this will commerce every way promote

  To this, let sons of commerce grant their vote.

  Contemporaries were unimpressed. John Francis writing of Gray in 1851, said: ‘With one consent he was voted an intolerable bore’. But the intolerable bore was to see the first step being taken towards the realization of his dream in 1825.

  The Stockton & Darlington Railway has gone down in history as the first public railway to be built specifically with steam locomotives in mind and to be designed to carry both passengers and freight, which is certainly true enough. But such a simple statement tends to mask the fact that it was essentially still a halfway house on the road to a wholly modern railway system: it was a colliery line writ large. For a start, hills were still overcome by inclines along which trains were hauled by cable, and although freight was shifted by steam, the first passengers were carried in what was in effect a stage coach with flanged wheels, pulled by a horse. It fell short even of Gray’s fantasy railway. Stephenson designed new locomotives, but they featured very little in the way of improvements over what had gone before. But in the end it was not so much what the Stockton & Darlington was that counted, as what it was seen to be. It was perceived as something wholly new. Henry Booth who was to become treasurer to the Liverpool & Manchester Railway, and an engineering innovator in his own right, described it as ‘the great theatre of practical operations upon railways’. It was an international theatre as well: visitors came from all over Europe, and they included the French engineer Marc Seguin, who was to share with Booth and Robert Stephenson the honour of producing the first multi-tubed boilers. The grandly named Pennsylvania Society for the Promotion of Internal Improvement sent over William Strickland to see what all the fuss was about. A climate was being created in which railways could grow. Within the next ten years railways were to open in France, Belgium, Germany and North America, and work would have begun in many more. And the call went out for the British to help build them.

  It is not difficult to see why British steam locomotives were in demand: the British were the only people in the world building them. One of the first things the astute George Stephenson did following the success of the Stockton & Darlington Railway was to establish a locomotive works in the name of his son, Robert – and Robert was not to disappoint him. Although 1825 had been a triumph, not everyone was convinced that steam locomotives would provide the power – and certainly not all the power – for a railway system. When the Liverpool & Manchester was begun, hard on the heels of the Stockton & Darlington, there was still a faction that wanted to see trains hauled by cable, passing on from stationary engine to stationary engine. There was a strong feeling that interesting though the steam locomotive was as a novelty, it was not really up to the task. That question was decisively answered in the famous Rainhill Trials of 1829. The nature of the test was clearly spelled out. A 6-ton locomotive had to show itself ‘capable of drawing after it, day by day, on a well-constructed Railway, on a level plane, a Train of Carriages of the gross weight of Twenty Tons, including the Tender and Water Tank, at a rate of Ten Miles per Hour, with a pressure of steam in the boiler not exceeding Fifty Pounds on the square inch’. There were to be three serious contenders. Timothy Hackworth, locomotive superintendent of the Stockton & Darlington Railway, built Sans Pareil at the company’s Shildon works – at his own expense. It was a sturdy engine using what were then well established principles, but failed at the trials when a cylinder cracked. John Braithwaite and John Ericsson’s privately constructed Novelty looked the greyhound of the pack, but was to prove fatally short of stamina; and there was Rocket, built at the Stephensons’ own Newcastle factory. Rocket contained all the principal design features that were to form the basis for locomotive design for the remainder of the century. The engine not only managed 10 miles an hour, it positively flew along at 30m.p.h.; and the plans for cable-worked inclines were quickly scrapped when Rocket tore up the slopes, with huge élan. No wonder engineers all over the world were unanimous that for a time, at least, British really was best.

  The actual technology of locomotive construction was not immensely complicated; hence there seems no good reason why overseas engineers should not speedily follow where Stephenson, Hackworth and others had led. Had there been a mechanical engineering school in France similar to their school of bridges and roads, no doubt they would have quickly followed. But this was not the case.

  The locomotive evolved slowly from the giant pumping engines that drained mines and its development ran parallel with the life of its principal developer, George Stephenson. Born in 1781, a collier’s son, he followed his father to the pit, being placed in charge of a winding engine that lifted men and coal from pit bottom to the surface, a responsible job which he was given at the age of just seventeen. He soon showed himself to be a resourceful practical engineer, able to spot problems when engines went wrong and devise methods of overcoming them, yet this expertise came from native wit and experience. He had virtually no formal education and was, at best, semi-literate.

  In 1812, a violent explosion at the Felling colliery resulted in the deaths of ninety-two men and boys. It was due to the lethal combination of ‘fire damp’ – methane gas – and naked lamps. A committee was set up offering a prize for a safety lamp. One of the winners was Sir Humphry Davy, who applied scientific principles in designing a lamp which was named after him. The other was George Stephenson, who employed trial and error, even to the point of taking his own lamp down to a spot where ‘a blower’ was sending out great gusts of gas. Had he been wrong, Stephenson would never have built a railway, or anything else, ever again. The interesting feature here is Davy’s reaction. He absolutely refused to believe that an illiterate collier was capable of such a thing, and when the mine managers of the north-east raised a special fund for Stephenson, he was incensed. He railed against the address of thanks ‘wh
ich every Man of Science in the Kingdom knows to be as fake in substance as it is absurd in expression.’ Practical working men could not possibly be the equal of educated men of science. But it was practical working men who were to develop the steam locomotive.

  The locomotive developed by Blenkinsop and Murray using a rack and pinion system to provide extra traction for the Middleton Colliery Railway.

  As Stephenson continued to rise in the colliery world, other men of similar background were also doing innovative work. Trevithick had sent his locomotive up to Christopher Blackett of the Wylam colliery, and Blackett in his turn encouraged his manager William Hedley to try his hand at engine design. The result was hard-working, sturdy engines like Puffing Billy, which with numerous modifications was to go on puffing right up to 1860. And Hedley brought in others to help. The Wylam blacksmith Timothy Hackworth joined in the exciting new work and though he was to be disappointed at Rainhill, he was to go on to build magnificent engines of great power, starting with the innovative Royal George. All these men shared the same background – strong on practice, virtually bereft of theory. George Stephenson had enough sense to see that his son Robert obtained a great deal more formal education than he had ever had, right up to university. Robert went to Edinburgh, the place with the highest reputation for science, but was unimpressed by what he learned there. University science came a poor second to the practical science of engineering works and mines. In 1822, he wrote a letter to an old family friend.