27 Sep 1825 — George Stephenson’s Locomotion No. 1 pulls coal wagons and a passenger coach from Shildon, through Darlington, to Stockton. The railway is built first to serve a colliery, and it becomes the world’s first public steam railway.
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27 SEPTEMBER 1825 · THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION, 1750–1914
The moment in context
A coal owner could sell fuel cheaply at the pit and still face a large transport bill. Tyneside mines had dealt with the problem since the seventeenth century by sending wagons to the river on wooden rails. Iron rails improved the wagonway; steam offered a way to move the wagons themselves. Richard Trevithick ran a high-pressure locomotive at Penydarren in South Wales in 1804, and in the 1810s colliery engineers including George Stephenson built locomotives at Killingworth near Newcastle.
Why it happened — Coal needed cheaper carriage. Coal’s low price made carriage a large part of its cost; moving it often cost more than mining it. For two centuries collieries, or coal mines, had…
The turn — Rainhill, October 1829. The Liverpool & Manchester directors considered two ways to haul their trains: fixed engines pulling cables, or locomotives traveling with the…
What it changed — A national market and national time. A railway could take coal, cloth, fish, milk and newspapers across the country overnight. Goods could reach more buyers, prices converged and local…
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