The First Trains

On 27 September 1825, a steam-powered marvel known as Locomotion No.1 made history, pulling passengers and coal from Shildon to Stockton-on-Tees in the North of England. This 25 mile journey, changed the world forever. Dan is joined by historian Steven Brindle as they mark the 200th anniversary of the world’s first passenger steam train journey—a moment that astonished crowds and launched a transport and industrial revolution. From George Stephenson’s pioneering design to the railway’s role in Britain’s industrial rise, this episode explores how trains reshaped the nation and the world. Produced by Mariana Des Forges and edited by Tim Arstall. You can sign up to watch Dan's documentary 'Steam' here: https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe. We'd love to hear your feedback - you can take part in our podcast survey here: https://insights.historyhit.com/history-hit-podcast-always-on. You can also email the podcast directly at [email protected] mailto:[email protected]. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Dan Snow?

  Hey friends, if you love this podcast and want to decide what history we cover, then you need to become a Dan Snow's History Hit subscriber. Pitch your topic and if I like it, we'll make it into a subscriber exclusive episode. So far, we've covered the English Reformation, the Hudson Bay Company, the Trail of Tears, all of which have been decided by dedicated subscribers. So take the reins of your favourite podcast by heading over to historyhit.com/subscribe or sign up in your podcast player.

• 0:32Speaker 01

  State Fair food is getting smaller and pricier.

• 0:36Speaker 02

  We'll have room for fried cookies.

• 0:37Speaker 01

  Okay, you'd never overspend on food. What's your deal?

• 0:40Speaker 03

  What's his deal? He went to Metro and got $450 in value on the new Samsung Galaxy 837 5G for free and no activation fees.

• 0:49Speaker 01

  Free phone? Oh, sign me up.

• 0:51Speaker 03

  Get that more for your money feeling, only on Metro by T-Mobile.

• 0:54Speaker 04

  Bring your number and activate $40 period plan. $450 based on device discount waived activation fee. Not available if with Metro T-Mobile in the past 180 days.

• 1:02Speaker 05

  This is the story of the one. As a shipping manager, he's running the dock, stocking supplies and making sure every order goes out on time. And Granger helps him stay prepared. From shipping supplies to PPE to hand tools, he counts on Granger to keep products moving and trucks rolling. So his operation runs smoothly, no matter the shift. Call 1-800-GRANGER, click Granger.com or just stop by. Granger, for the ones who get it done.

• 1:38Dan Snow?

  On the 27th of September 1825, a bizarre, a brilliant contraption, billowing steam and smoke, travelled down a track from the Collierys, near Shildon, County Durham, in the north of England, through Darlington to the port of Stockton-on-Tees. There was such a buzz about it, such excitement that 300 passengers had bought tickets to go on this train ride, but in the end, she pulled probably twice that, as well as 11 wagons of coal. This astounded eyewitnesses. They thought it was brilliant. They thought it was bewildering. They knew that they were getting a glimpse into the future. This was the very first passenger steam train.

• 2:23Dan Snow?

  Locomotion number one, a steam train devised by the brilliant engineer George Stephenson to move coal and people over long distances smoothly and reliably. As well as the passengers, there were plenty more people who turned up that day. Onlookers walked the length of the 25 mile track to catch a look at this new fangled machine. Affectionately, people referred to it as an iron horse. These onlookers waved their hats and their handkerchiefs and they cheered themselves horse. Locomotion travelled at about 12 miles an hour. And the passengers who were lucky enough to ride described the sensation of moving so quickly, it was exhilarating, it was unsettling. It was history being made.

• 3:05Dan Snow?

  The world would never be the same again. Now, this September in 2025 marks the 200th anniversary of that landmark journey, the beginning of the Stockton Darlington Railway, which would go on to carry millions more passengers over the centuries, not to mention all of the other railways that grew out from it. The story of the railway in Britain is a story of the nation's industrialisation and modernisation. Initially devised for coalfields to get coal to market, they were perfected by men like George Stephenson, Eisenbad Kingdom Brunel, of course, were still making better and faster trains than ever before. And those railways shrank distances, they sped up trade

• 3:47Dan Snow?

  and communication, they revolutionised daily life. They fuelled industrial growth, they linked factories and ports with raw materials. Cities grew enormously as people could flock to them and fresh food could be brought in regularly from the countryside. Railways gave people new mobility and leisure opportunities. Britain became the workshop of the world, north of the crucible for this explosion of railways. Britain's railways were exported across the empire and beyond. They carried British goods, they carried British industry. Though sadly, in more recent decades, they've been challenged by cars and planes,

• 4:26Dan Snow?

  the railways remain a symbol of that first great spasm of the Industrial Revolution, as well as being a symbol of Britain's ingenuity and the transformation it unleashed on the planet. To tell that story, I'm joined by friend of the podcast, historian Stephen Brindle. This is Dan Snow's History Hit, and we're talking about the big anniversary of the first passenger carrying train. Enjoy.

• 4:56Speaker 06

  T minus ten.

• 4:57Speaker 07

  Atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima. God save the Queen. No black-white unity till there is first and black unity. Never to go to war with one another again.

• 5:07Speaker 06

  And liftoff, and the shuttle has cleared the tower.

• 5:13Dan Snow?

  Stephen, thank you very much for coming on the podcast.

• 5:16Speaker 06

  Thank you, Dan. Always a pleasure.

• 5:18Dan Snow?

  I think it's always really important, isn't it, to emphasise that there had been railways, and there had also been steam engines. It was the marrying together of the whole thing.

• 5:26Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 5:27Dan Snow?

  Tell me about pre-steam or pre- locomotion trackways, railways, because they were quite common, weren't they?

• 5:34Speaker 06

  From the late 16th century, people who ran quarries and mines and ironworks needed to carry very heavy loads around, basically masses of stone. And they found that it was much easier to do so if you could make a wagon which had metal rims and which might have a metal flange to run on rails. It's a matter of minimising the friction, Dan, because your wagon's going to be pulled by a horse. So if you minimise the friction and keep the surface as smooth as possible, your horse will be able to pull a lot more than it would in a regular cart on a regular road, which would be about sort of nine tenths

• 6:17Speaker 06

  mud. And so there were horse-drawn tramways in use at hundreds of mines and quarries and ironworks all over England and Wales and in Scotland, yes.

• 6:28Dan Snow?

  And I suppose... It's the extractive industries that are leading in that because you can lay down those tramways because you need to get from

• 6:36Speaker 06

  Exactly.

• 6:37Dan Snow?

  Coalface to

• 6:38Speaker 06

  Yes.

• 6:38Dan Snow?

  The River Tyne, wherever that coal, that cargo is going to get put on ships and then

• 6:42Speaker 06

  Exactly so sir. You need to get from an ironworks to a canal or to a road or preferably to a stave or quay. And in particular, you need to get coal to a quayside. And so all over North East England, there were collieries which had trackways and tramways. And engineers also in late 18th century, learned how to make these things called inclined planes, where you make a sort of sloping structure to go down a slope and you lay parallel tracks so that a heavy wagon going down can pull the empty one back up. And you need a gearing system and an axle at the top and the brakeman to work it. So they were building all that

• 7:26Speaker 06

  kind of thing. Yes, in late 18th and early 19th centuries.

• 7:29Dan Snow?

  So that's clever. That's a gravity fed system. As one goes up, the other comes down.

• 7:33Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 7:34Dan Snow?

  There's a sort of parallel revolution going on in heat engines, I suppose we call them. And that's what from the beginning of the 18th century.

• 7:43Speaker 06

  Yes.

• 7:44Dan Snow?

  People have worked out that the power of heating water to create steam. Everyone will have heard of steam engines. What is it that's so useful about steam?

• 7:52Speaker 06

  Well, steam expands. It fills a much higher volume than the water and the air of which it's composed. And so you can use the expansion of the steam to produce pressure and the pressure will push a piston, will push a plate up the cylinder which pushes a piston. Only you then have to condense the steam to produce a vacuum to pull the plate back down. And so early steam engines, right up to the 1770s, what were called atmospheric engines. That is, they worked at very little, not much above atmospheric pressure. And you had to have a condenser, you had to condense the steam and pull it back down. So they

• 8:36Speaker 06

  worked on a very slow cycle, on a very slow Stroke, although they could be quite powerful, all they could do basically was generate an up and down motion. So you could pump water with them. If you attach lots and lots of poles together, you could get down a pumping action down into a pump sump at the bottom of the mine and that would pump water up. And so the first great use for atmospheric engines as invented by Thomas Savery and Thomas Newcoman was to pump water out of deep mines was mostly what they did. And they were very inefficient, of course, but that's all they had. But as England's demand for coal grew greater, the mines got deeper

• 9:18Speaker 06

  and the mines became more and more inclined to flood, which obviously would shut your operation completely. So this was crucial. And in the 1770s, a very brilliant Scotsman called James Watt realised that the key to a better engine was to send the spent steam to a separate vessel called a condenser. And that meant you could speed up the whole process and also up the pressure at which it ran. And the Bolton and Watt engine, which was patented in the 1770s, was a step forward. And so in the late 18th century, various people around the country were looking how to compete with Bolton and Watt, who really were the standard setters, and make better engines.

• 10:03Dan Snow?

  Humans have been harnessing even the tide, but the tidal power, kinetic movement, wind power, rivers, water power, steam engines later create energy. So to do the work of many humans, but sort of anywhere, because you can build this engine and feed coal into it. You'd have to worry about if you're getting a good breeze or there's a river nearby.

• 10:22Speaker 06

  Yes, absolutely. Bolton and Watt's first engine, patented in 1774, was still basically a pumping engine, which had a beam on top, what they call a beam engine. And all it could do really was to push up and pull down. That is, that's its pumping action. But in 1782, Watt worked out how to redesign his engine to drive an axle, that is, to generate fixed rotary motion. Now, in the past, fixed rotary motion Industrial purposes with grinding corn or blowing a furnace bellows or whatever had only been achievable by wind power, water power, human or animal power. And now you could generate rotor in motion for as long as you like and actually much more powerfully

• 11:06Speaker 06

  using steam power. And so what's second patent was really a momentous step for all of humankind. And without that, the steam locomotive would not have been possible because a steam engine had to be able to turn an axle for a steam locomotive to be possible. And even so, it took another 20 years.

• 11:27Dan Snow?

  And then you get this phenomenon, don't you? The static steam engine. So again, on these trackways, it had been horse and human and gravity powered. But then you get these remarkable trackways where you have a steam engine, but it's static and it's just hauling these carts along.

• 11:41Speaker 06

  Yep. So you get places, especially ironworks like Penny Darren, ironworks run by Samuel Humphrey, was one where a lot of early innovations happened, where they thought, well, we have steam engines and we know how to build steam engines. So instead of using horses, we could, especially if you had a slight slope, we could use a static steam engine to let our trucks down and pull them back up again, that kind of thing. Um, and as well as a parallel feed to the inclined planes. And so people are starting to use fixed steam engines to pull loads as well. And then this extraordinary man called Richard Trevithick comes along

• 12:23Speaker 06

  right at the end of the 18th century, beginning of the 19th, and he really invented the steam locomotive.

• 12:29Dan Snow?

  Well, yes, this is the bit, Stephen, where you and I get the death threats from various, um, steam fans. We have to be very careful to whom we ascribe various breakthroughs here, don't we? I made a TV show once and didn't mention Trevithick and I'm still living down the show.

• 12:43Speaker 06

  Well, we'd better not do that again because he was a marvelous man.

• 12:46Dan Snow?

  Trevithick has the idea that these steam engines could move around, so under their own power.

• 12:52Speaker 06

  Uh. Yes, he did. Don't really know how he worked that out. He was a mining engineer, son of a mine captain, brilliant with machinery, and Trevitic patented a high-pressure cylinder steam engine in seventeen ninety-nine, which was an advance on the Bolton water model. And he reasoned that then that if you could put it on a wheeled chassis, you could get it to move under its own steam. And he built a steam carriage, which should have been like sort of a traction engine, which he exhibited in London eighteen oh three. But the first one we know really worked was built for Samuel Honthray at the Penny Darren Iron Works in South Wales in eighteen oh four. And this one pulled five tonnes of iron for ten miles at a stately two and a half miles an hour.

• 13:36Dan Snow?

  And that was the world's first locomotive-hauled railway journey.

• 13:41Speaker 06

  Indeed. Penny Darren, eighteen oh four. Wales takes the prize. And Trevitic put on a public demonstration with his, probably his fourth locomotive, the Catch Me Who Can.

• 13:52Dan Snow?

  And I love that name, the Catch Me Who Can.

• 13:54Speaker 06

  Which probably went at about five miles an hour. And he exhibited at a site just about on the size of a Euston Station in eighteen oh eight to nine. And there were engravings which showed this sort of circular inclusion, this circular track, a bit like one of those children's miniature railways you see in chopping centres. And he ran, went round and round and round. But Trevitic's whole problem was that he was an absolute pioneer, he had virtually no backup, he had no big investor behind him. And his locomotives were slow, unreliable, and had tendency to have accidents. There was one occasion, I think one of his moving steam locomotives, they stopped at a pub and they had too good a lunch. And I think they forgot to manage the boiler fire

• 14:37Speaker 06

  or put more water in, and the boiler burnt dry and caught fire. And Trevitic, not only did he not make money out of his inventions, he was actually bankrupted in eighteen eleven to fourteen. And eighteen sixteen, he went to work as a mining engineer in South America, and his career ended in absolute tragedy. It's terribly sad story. Because his engines weren't quite reliable enough to attract large scale support. And without large scale support, he couldn't afford the work to develop and perfect them, which I'm quite sure he could have done.

• 15:09Dan Snow?

  They only did, if you like, develop them, if not entirely perfect them, but George Stephenson.

• 15:13Speaker 06

  Indeed.

• 15:14Dan Snow?

  While we're on the subject, what's going on in Britain at the time? How are these unschooled men from what we could describe as the lowest rungs of society? It almost all seems a bit meritocratic. They're able to develop, they're able to teach themselves, find investments. We're told this is a very hierarchical society and yet there's something exciting going on in Britain at the time. These people are able to thrive, to build businesses, to develop engineering and scientific solutions. What's in the water in this age?

• 15:40Speaker 06

  You've absolutely hit on something crucial about Georgian England, Georgian Britain there, Dan, in that we tend to view it through these literary artistic eyes and see there's a snobbish, leisured, no, romantic artistic qualities. But underneath that, it was a very, very dynamic economy where the state took only about 10% of GDP and where there was a very driven middle class of businessmen, bankers and entrepreneurs who really wanted to make money. And there were very, very few legal impediments to them making money. There were no restrictions on how you employ people, no trade unions. There were no monopolies of any kinds.

• 16:20Speaker 06

  And there was the legal system, which if you got entangled in it, could be pretty sticky. But if you were sure of your property, then your property was yours and contracts were enforceable at law. And all of that was crucial, really. And the middle class people, who were excellent at managing money and prepared to work 10, 12, 14 hour days. What they needed was people who were good with their hands and could manage the stuff and were prepared to work 10, 12, 14 hour days, which is where people like Richard Privick and George Stephenson, if you made a reputation and got the investors to trust you, then you could really get on.

• 17:03Speaker 06

  They were still the bosses, you were still the mechanic. But in George's case, he was so successful that he died as a very rich man, which poor Tervithick did not.

• 17:12Dan Snow?

  So George Stephenson, born in seventeen eighty one ish, son of a coal miner, just went to work with his dad in the colliery. And as a teenager, fourteen years old, just worked his way up because he was adept. He was a good machinist.

• 17:26Speaker 06

  He was naturally brilliant with his hands and he had an instinct for machinery like Tervithick. And he became an assistant engineer at Killingworth Colliery and he was responsible for managing various pieces of machinery, but including the fixed engines which pumped the water out of the mine and which wound the caged with miners up and down and the ore out. So that was a big responsibility because their lives were in your hands and he was doing that as a teenager.

• 17:49Dan Snow?

  Was he aware of the work Tervithick was doing? Did he knowingly build on what had gone before? Or was it just something that the whole country was abuzz with?

• 17:56Speaker 06

  No, this would have been, this was before Tervithick had actually produced his locomotives. I mean, George was born in seventeen eighty one, but Penny Darren locomotive was eighteen oh four. So those hadn't actually happened at this stage, but the country was full of businesses starting using steam engines and manufacturers trying to make the steam engines better to sell more of them. George himself was completely uneducated. He was illiterate and as a teenager, he knew that if he was going to get on in the world, he would have to do what his father had never done and learn to read and write. And he paid for his wages to go to night school and learnt to read and write. That's one measure of the man.

• 18:37Speaker 06

  As a teenager, he did that. He redesigned the collier engine at Killingworth and he made it more efficient. And the colliery was owned by a sort of consortium of coal owners called the Grand Allies. And they noticed, they noticed what an asset he was and they trusted him. And he became a sort of consultant who'd go and fix mechanical problems in the area. And he'd really done that by the time he was in his twenties. So he was known and trusted and he'd been working every hour God gave, making engines, running engines for the Grand Allies in the north east of England and County Durham.

• 19:13Dan Snow?

  And then we get that phenomenon that we're very familiar with in today's. Revolution that we've all lived through, which is the importance of venture capital, I suppose, investors, if you if you want to get new stuff off the ground.

• 19:23Speaker 06

  Yes, absolutely. In winning the trust of the Grand Allies, he'd won a really major battle there. And so they gave him the resources in eighteen fourteen, they let him use some of the company's money to build a steam locomotive. He'd have heard of Penny Daran, which half of what happened in eighteen O four, and he'd have heard of Captain Huguenot. I don't know if he'd seen either of them, it seems, but he would have seen engravings. And his was actually based on an engine made by another man called Matthew Murray, who's rather the the forgotten figure in all this. And Murray was a much more successful engineer than Trithic. And he was a partner of substantial ironworks and they made machinery for textile mills in Yorkshire.

• 20:05Speaker 06

  And Murray had made an engine called Salamanca in eighteen twelve for a colliery called Leeds. And that was the first really commercially successful one. The problem with the Salamanca was it ran on what was called a rack system, that it had a toothed wheel, which connected with a toothed rail. So that was all very complicated to make and maintain. And George thought, well, this toothed rail business, I mean, how are you going to make all that and maintain it and stop it cracking? So he built his locomotive, the Blusha, and he made sure that instead it had flanged wheels. That is wheels which had a flange which went down and sort of held it on to the rails instead of a toothed wheel. And so it was much more efficient and powerful than Murray's. And that was a crucial step forward once he'd built Blusha at Killingworth.

• 20:50Speaker 06

  And in eighteen twenty, he built a whole new colliery railway to place called Hetton, run by gravity and stationary engines and locomotive.

• 20:59Dan Snow?

  Wow. So it's just constant evolution, constant improvement. At some stage, though, they think to themselves, we're going to create a railways, we might understand it in the modern sense. And presumably these colliery railways, well, they're for just moving things around inside the colliery. Is this a sort of regional ambition? You really can get from one place to a quite different distinct place some distance away.

• 21:21Speaker 06

  The Grand Allies who owned Killingworth would have owned several relatively short colliery. Tramways and then the Heton Colliery Railway was built, which was eight miles long, which would have been a very long one by the standards of the age. But the Durham coal owners had a wider problem in that a lot of the best coalfields in Durham were quite well inland in the area around Bishop Auckland and they needed to get their coal either to the Tyne, the north, or to the Tees, to the south, and actually to the Tees was much easier. And so this could either mean a colliery tramway or a canal, but the topography was tricky and it was problematic for either tramway or canal.

• 22:04Speaker 06

  And a Welsh engineer called George Oates was consulted and he said, I think, given this sort of country you had, you want a tram road. And the company eventually was set up by a public meeting in Darlington in 1818. And that would say, well, a canal is probably too difficult, but we are going to build a tram road from the middle of County Durham all the way to the Tees, 25 miles.

• 22:26Dan Snow?

  So it's not hugely different in its sort of theory to the one that the Heton Colliery, but it is three times as long.

• 22:32Speaker 06

  Yeah, three times as long. And in this case, the crucial figure who made the Stockton and Darlington Railway take off was a banker called Edward Pease of Darlington. And the Peases were Quakers and there were several English shitties which had small colonies of Quaker businessmen. Quakers were pacifists, deeply devout people who generally kept themselves themselves, but they had a well deserved reputation for absolute honesty and probity in their dealings. And so Edward became the key figure in making the Stockton and Darlington work. Two thirds of the shares were sold locally and the rest were sold to Quakers nationally through Edward and his connections.

• 23:16Speaker 06

  So it was set up by a network of Quaker bankers, really, because no one else could put up the money and it was known as a Quaker undertaking. And they knew that to make the railway, they'd have to take property, they'd have to go over all sorts of people's property, and they would need an act of parliament. And they didn't get in with the right landowners, the Earl of Eldon and the Earl of Darlington. You thought it would interfere with their fox hunting. And so they opposed the first bill, which fell in eighteen nineteen. And the second bill was introduced into Parliament for a slightly different route, and that passed in eighteen twenty one. And the idea of the Stockton and Darlington Railway, when it opened, was that it would be like a turnpike

• 24:01Speaker 06

  road, that they'd make a tramway, and anyone who owned or built a suitable wagon for coal could use it for a toll. So it wasn't envisaged at the outset as being like a railway company which would own its rolling stock. So they were still thinking it as being a bit more like a turnpike road.

• 24:20Dan Snow?

  Here's to Dan's Noisy History at More on Trains after this.

• 24:30Dan Snow?

  This episode is brought to you by TikTok. I never thought about the history of coffee. You make it, you drink it, nothing more to it. Then I've had a TikTok video about how people in the seventeen hundreds would pour their coffee into saucers to let it cool before drinking it. I love that sort of discovery, a detail, but suddenly you're imagining how people lived and drank and socialised. Now I wonder what all baffled historians about us: mugs. It's a ceramic vessel, but crucially, it has a handle. Well, that's the joy of TikTok, folks. You look for one thing and find yourself somewhere completely different. Your next discovery is waiting on TikTok. Learn more at tiktok.com/discovermore.

• 25:12Dan Snow?

  This episode is brought to you by Decagon. If you've ever been trapped in phone tree hell, pushing zero fifty times while a voice robot pretends not to hear you, you know true psychological warfare. It's brutal, folks. Thankfully, that kind of horror is now confined to the history books. Customer service has evolved. Decagon helps companies create personalised, concierge-style customer experience.

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• 26:24Speaker 01

  State fair food is getting smaller and pricier.

• 26:28Speaker 02

  We'll have room for fried cookies.

• 26:29Speaker 01

  Okay, you'd never overspend on food. What's your deal?

• 26:33Speaker 03

  What's his deal? He went to Metro and got $450 in value on the new Samsung Galaxy A37 5G for free and no activation fees.

• 26:41Speaker 01

  Free phone? Oh, sign me up.

• 26:44Speaker 03

  Get that more for your money feeling, only on Metro by T-Mobile.

• 26:47Speaker 04

  Bring your number and activate $40 period plan. $450 based on device discount waived activation fee. Not available with Metro T-Mobile in the past 180 days.

• 26:55Speaker 05

  This is the story of the one. As a shipping manager, he's running the dock, stocking supplies and making sure every order goes out on time. And Granger helps him stay prepared. From shipping supplies to PPE to hand tools, he counts on Granger to keep products moving and trucks rolling, so his operation runs smoothly no matter the shift. Call 1-800-GRANGER, click Granger.com or just stop by. Granger, for the ones who get it done.

• 27:33Dan Snow?

  Is it George Stephenson who said, no, this needs to be moving steam engines, locomotive steam?

• 27:39Speaker 06

  Well, yes, it was, but Pease and his Quaker investors thought, who is going to build this for us? And they certainly weren't thinking in terms of steam locomotives at all. I mean, steam locomotives were this sort of weird thing like that funny Cornish guy exhibited in London once, and isn't the one at a Colliery somewhere? And that wouldn't really be on anyone's mental map.

• 28:02Dan Snow?

  And they keep blowing up and they're unreliable.

• 28:03Speaker 06

  And they keep blowing up and catching fire. No, we'll have safe old horses and we'll just pay for the oats. And they invited George because he was known as a man who can make things and get things done. So local entrepreneurs set up a company, the Quakers take it over and make it fly and get the Act of Parliament. And then Edward Pease thinks this Overton guy doesn't really know what he's doing. And George Stephenson really seems like a man who knows how to make and maintain things. And he invited George to come and see him in 1821, I think after they actually got the Act of Parliament. And George surveyed a new route, he found a shorter route for it, he recommended malleable wrought

• 28:45Speaker 06

  iron rails, not cast iron rails, and he's appointed engineer with a really princely salary of £660 in January 1822. And that shows how far he's already risen in the world. And in mid 1822, he took Edward Pease to Killingworth to watch his locomotive Glusha in action. And that's the moment at which I think George sold the idea of steam locomotion to Edward Pease.

• 29:12Dan Snow?

  What a moment, what a moment. What has George got to do? Is he presumably wants to build a better locomotive? But is that the main challenge? Or is the laying of the track in itself and overcoming geographical obstacles, is that an equal engineering challenge?

• 29:24Speaker 06

  Oh, I'd have thought that for George, there were lots of unknowns to tackle in making twenty five miles of tram road. I mean, that was really at another scale to anything which anyone had attempted. Canal engineers had made much longer canals than that, that was certainly true. But he hadn't. And he knew that he would have to keep his line very, very level. Because if he was going to be used by horses, a horse can't really pull a very heavy load up much of a slope at all. And you don't really want much of a downhill slope either, frankly. So one of the engineering challenges would be the surveying challenge of keeping his route very, very level.

• 30:05Speaker 06

  And every time you intersected with an existing right of way, you'd have to have go under it or over it, or have a level crossing. And you'd be dividing lots of farms. So you'd have to have accommodation crossings for all of them. And there were all of the problems which later railway builders encountered. And George in making his survey-

• 30:25Dan Snow?

  And still are encountering today, we should say.

• 30:27Speaker 06

  And still are encountering today. And all of those problems about negotiating it with all of the local interests, many of whom might be deeply opposed and not at all happy with all these sort of coal wagons coming through the middle of their property. So the problem of negotiating and designing this in detail and then building it would have been a huge one for someone who's primarily a mechanical engineer. But George did it. And he got it done. Although the cost did rise a long way above what they'd initially expected, as railways generally did.

• 30:59Dan Snow?

  Well, I'm glad to hear that's not an exclusively twenty first century problem. So the infrastructure was obviously challenging. What about the engine itself? Did things move? Did he progress things in terms of the locomotive?

• 31:09Speaker 06

  Uh, yes, he did. I mean, it was already ten years since George had built Blisha. He set up a company. Robert Stevenson and Company, based in Newcastle-Pontine, which he vested in his very brilliant only son, Robert, and Robert Stevenson and Company was set up largely to make steam engines, but in particular to make steam locomotives and to make them better than anyone else. And the new company made a new locomotive, Locomotion Number One, and there was a specially built passenger code called the Experiment as well. So George had actually, with some of the money he was making from this, he set up a manufacturing company in Newcastle-Pontine, and Robert Stevenson

• 31:53Speaker 06

  and Company became the leading locomotive manufacturers of the age, and they were certainly technically the best around. He also got the line built in three years. The the track was laid between May 1822 and it opened in September 1825, 25 miles of track from Shildon, which is in the middle of County Tome, the coal mining area, running south to Darlington, then along the Tees Valley to Stockton, which is the town at the point where the Tees becomes navigable. And there were several branches leading to coal mines.

• 32:26Dan Snow?

  And tell me about the great day itself, when finally, in September 1825, when Locomotion puffed down the track.

• 32:34Speaker 06

  On 27th of September 1825, George had taken Locomotion Number One and the Experiment to Shildon, and his older brother James was driving the engine. I mean, he'd given the Pease family a sort of trial drive along it, I think the day before. And on the great day, about 12 wagon loads of coal were ready at Colliery, and on the first part of the journey, in the branches to Colliery, the wagons were still being pulled by stationary engines and ropes, in the way you've described, to Shildon. So the Locomotion actually started at Shildon, and then it pulled 21 wagons in all, some with coal, and some had been fitted with seats. There was supposed

• 33:16Speaker 06

  to be space for 300 passengers, but actually there were 450 on the train. And they travelled to Darlington, where a crowd of 10,000 people were waiting to welcome it. And more wagons with the Yarmouth Town Band were attached and more wagons of coal. And from there, the locomotion pulled an extended train of no less than thirty one wagons to Stockton to a temporary station outside the town. And then there was a huge celebratory dinner. So it was quite a day, but thirty one wagons and some like five hundred people on board. I think George had really proved what locomotion could do. I mean, I wonder if he knew that it could pull that much.

• 33:56Dan Snow?

  That's the date we've chosen to be the two hundredth anniversary of steam. It changed the world in almost every conceivable way. But what is it about this journey? Is it the length of the journey? Is it the fact that it's a passenger carrying train now? What is it about this that makes it the big moment?

• 34:15Speaker 06

  It put so many different things together, Dan. It put so many things which had been brewing in Georgia and England together. And it showed that something completely new could actually work and be economic. If you think about twenty thousand miles of turnpike roads being adopted and upgraded with a one and a half million pounds in revenue on tolls. Competitive coach services, mail coach services increasingly fast and competitive were running over us. So the whole model for competitive passenger transport, four thousand miles of canal had been built and improving the roads and building the canals had enormously improved surveying

• 34:59Speaker 06

  skills to make that. And it encouraged the formation of large contracting companies to do it. And the model of the limited company, the joint stock company had been developed. And then there was the model of the Colliery tramways. And so the steam locomotive was really the last piece in an enormously complex jigsaw, social, economic, technical and financial. And every piece of that jigsaw was needed. And Stockton Darlington is the place at which all of this came together. And so it's not a single invention. It's the coming together of lots. Lots of things which had been happening in Georgian England and which were on the verge of working.

• 35:42Speaker 06

  And at last, George Stephenson made it work for the Stockton and Darlington Railway. And people went, wow, that will really work. We can put our money in and we won't lose it. And people are already sitting up and taking notice elsewhere.

• 35:58Dan Snow?

  They put their money in, they made a lot of money within a couple of years, didn't they? And that in turn means you can dig new mines because you can actually get that coal to market. You can, you can take vast amounts of coal, the efficiencies, the volume. And as I remember, Stockton either silted up or the key was too small, wasn't it? And they extend that line to Middlesbrough, which people will of course know today. And so in a way that becomes the new terminus, which is why Middlesbrough exists today. So.

• 36:23Speaker 06

  That is exactly why Middlesbrough exists today as a result of the extension of the Stockton and Darlington Railway. As you say, it went from being a few houses to having 2,000 inhabitants a year later, by about 1830. One of the crucial points was that the Peas's did not lose money. If they'd been seen to lose money, that could have been toxic. Edward Pease had had to put up a tonne of money to make this happen because it had cost about £167,000 to build. But they didn't and it generated money so reliably and fast that they had to extend the railway itself. Because the states at Stockton actually weren't big enough for the volume of coal that they were bringing. And that they were able, they could afford to extend it to Middlesbrough in a very few years.

• 37:06Dan Snow?

  And I guess just to sum up why it matters, it's the smashing, it's the breaking out of the restrictions placed upon us by physics, by time, by space. You can now move unimaginable volumes and weights of material across challenging landscapes. At regular predictable and quite high speeds. I mean, this is, this is the birth of the modern world, a world of communication revolution where we assume it's the most natural thing in the world. That we can eat produce from around the world at any time of year, where we can move things reliably from one place to another, where we can. Gosh, everything, everything. It's a founding moment.

• 37:45Speaker 06

  It's all that, Dan. Railways, I think more than any other invention, released mankind from the Malthusian trap of population always exceeding or threatening to exceed resources, which had restricted population rise and initiation of a long rise in human life expectancy and living standards and economic growth of modern times.

• 38:05Dan Snow?

  And we should mention the massive acceleration of the release of those byproducts that you get from burning fossil fuels, coming out of the chimney of locomotion, number one, although we couldn't see it at the time, we realise, those gases that would change the composition of our atmosphere.

• 38:20Speaker 06

  We know that now and they didn't know it then, but of course, we would not have the scientific and technological society to have anything like that kind of knowledge. If the Industrial Revolution hadn't happened in the first place, this is the ultimate chicken and egg issue, I think, Dan. Without the Industrial Revolution, we would never have the scientific understanding to understand our atmosphere and what's happening to it anyway. At least we now know and we can take action to reduce carbon emissions. We stand on the shoulders of giants, Dan, and we have a deep debt of gratitude to them, I think.

• 38:53Dan Snow?

  An extraordinary father and son, George, and then, as you mentioned, Robert, that would take an increasing role, and we may cover that. We look at the next anniversaries of the building of Liverpool Manchester Railway. Thank you very much for coming on.

• 39:05Speaker 06

  Dan, a pleasure as always. Thank you very much.

• 39:12Dan Snow?

  Well, thank you so much to Stephen for coming back on the podcast. If you enjoyed this episode, why don't you leave us a review wherever you get your pods? And if you want more on the history of trains, which I know you do, you can check out my history hit documentary, Steam, in which I rode on the replica locomotion, a wonderful thing. To sign up to watch it, just click the link in the show notes. See you next time.

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