The Very First Locomotives

With the harnessing of steam power in the mines, iron became cheaper and cast iron rails became more usual. These railways operated by man-power, horse-power, or sometimes by a rope attached to a stationary engine.

In 1759 James Watt, who had developed the steam engine, is believed to have experimented with steam power in a locomotive, and his assistant William Murdock made a working model which was preserved in the now defunct Birmingham Museum of Science and Industry. However, the Smethwick Engine made by Boulton and Watt, which was in service from May 1779, can be seen at the new science and technology museum in Birmingham, Thinktank.

In France, Joseph Cugnot built a steam engine for operation on the highway in 1769, but the first locomotive to run on rails was built by an Englishman, Richard Trevithick.

Trevithick developed his own road vehicle (which when first tried out in 1801 broke down after 300 yards and later set fire to the coach-house of the hotel where Trevithick was recovering) and then built a locomotive which he demonstrated in 1804 on Pen-y-Darr an Ironworks Railway in Wales. It carried ten tons of iron ore and seventy passengers in five wagons, at five miles per hour along a ten mile line.

Four years later Trevithick tried to rouse public interest by building a circular track on some waste land near where Euston Station (London) stands today. For a shilling Londoners could travel in open carriages pulled by a locomotive called Catch Me Who Can.

All the early railways were operated for private use, but three years before Richard Trevithick's success at Pen-y-Darran the World's first public railway was chartered by an Act of Parliament - on 26th July 1803 it was opened between Wandsworth Wharf and Croydon. Although flanged wheels had been known in Germany since the mid-sixteenth century and were used in Great Britain at Bath as early as 1731, these cars had smooth wheels and ran on angled rails.

Others followed Trevithick's lead; one man, called Brunton, tried to make a locomotive which walked like a horse! William Hedley, at one time Trevithick's agent and a director of Wylam Colliery, Durham, designed a locomotive very like the Catch Me Who Can and took out a patent in 1813 with Mr. Blacken, owner of the colliery. They called the locomotive Puffing Billy.

George Stephenson, an engineer from Wylam, at this time working at a Killingworth colliery, saw Trevithick and Hedley's machines and with the encouragement of Lord Ravensworth built a locomotive which, on 25th July 1814, drew eight carriages weighing twenty tons up a slight ascent. In 1815, he took out a patent for his locomotive, which he named the Blücher.

Stephenson became technical manager of the Stockton and Darlington Railway in 1823. The company was formed in 1821 and the line was opened publicly on 27th September, 1825, with a train drawn by 'Locomotive No. 1.'