Text A. He Started Britain’s Railways

During the First Industrial Revolution machinery was taking the place of human labour and factories were being built all over England. The new factories needed coal for driving their machines, therefore the demand for coal was becoming so great that a quicker and cheaper method of transport was becoming an urgent need.

Several attempts had already been made to design a steam locomotive, based upon Watt’s stationary engines. None of the attempts had been successful.

Stephenson had followed these earlier experiments with great interest, and he became convinced that he could design a locomotive. So he decided to try to build an engine with two vertical cylinders and a boiler, eight feet long and three feet in diameter. He then laid, instead of the wooden rails used by the horse wagons, smooth metal rails for his engine to run on. This innovation made his experiment successful. His locomotive hauled eight loaded wagons weighing more than thirty tons at a speed of four miles an hour.

No engine had done such a thing before, but Stephenson considered this engine only a beginning. When he heard that there were plans to build a railway of about thirty-six miles for horse-drawn wagons to carry both goods and passengers between Stockton and Darlington, Stephenson asked for the task of building the railway. He said that he was going to use metal instead of wooden rails, and steam-engines instead of horses. Stephenson even decided to establish his own locomotive factory in Newcastle to build locomotives for the Stockton - Darlington railway.

When the new railway was opened on September 27, 1825, several thousand people came to watch the ceremony. The train consisted of six wagons loaded with coal and flour and twenty-two trucks had benches for the use of any members of the public who wished to ride. Stephenson himself drove the engine. By the time the train reached Stockton, it was carrying more than six hundred passengers.

The building of the Stockton-Darlington railway for a steam locomotive won Stephenson such a good reputation that he was soon invited to build a still larger railway, this time between Liverpool and Manchester to serve the expanding cotton industry.

While this work was going on, the promoters of the railway offered a prize to the engineer who would build the best engine for it. There were five competitors, but the prize was won by George Stephenson with his new engine the Rocket. This engine had a boiler with twenty-five fire-tubes in it which improved steam generation.