Description
The story of Wylam village in Northumberland is a story about the origin of railways. The birthplace of George Stephenson, it was the centre for the first revolutionary pioneering work on railway engineering which laid the foundations for all that followed.
At the beginning of the nineteenth century, on the instigation of colliery owner Christopher Blackett, a series of revolutionary experiments in railway technology were conducted.
The principal protagonists read like a roll call of great railway engineers: the wayward genius Richard Trevithick, the devout Methodist Timothy Hackworth who wouldn’t work on the Sabbath and the portly asthmatic William Hedley who oversaw the work.
It was Hedley who, in 1813, would invent the legendary Puffing Billy, the first reliable working steam locomotive.
Herby Dumpling –
An excellent book. George Smith has a very friendly writing style. It is almost as if he is a verbal story teller of the age he is writing about.
He brings to the fore lots of names new to me in the development of railways and early locomotives. It is surprising so much of the development happened in such a relatively small area of the country, but there was a problem to be solved, and money to be earned by solving it, so these mostly uneducated people got on and did what was needed. He tells their story almost as if he had been there at the time.
I would recommend this book if you really want to know who did what. Like me you may be surprised as there are many false claims being handed down in the classrooms of industrial history. Whilst I can’t check every fact in the book and do feel a trial and test method of small advances is the way locomotives and railways were developed. A thoroughly good read.