The Victorian Era

When Did the First Steam Train Run

Article · Science & Invention · The Victorian Era, 1837–1901

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The first self-propelled steam locomotive to run on rails was the Penydarren, built by Richard Trevithick and demonstrated on the Merthyr Tydfil tramroad in South Wales on 21 February 1804, twenty-six years before the start of the Victorian era. The first public railway to use steam traction, the Stockton and Darlington Railway, opened on 27 September 1825, and the first public railway to use steam exclusively for traction, the Liverpool and Manchester Railway, opened on 15 September 1830, just seven years before Queen Victoria came to the throne. The Liverpool and Manchester line, with Stephenson’s Rocket as its principal locomotive, set the technical and commercial pattern for the railway age that followed. The story of the first steam train is part of the wider history of Transport in the Victorian Era and of the Victorian Engineering Marvels that the railway made possible.

The Early Steam Locomotives

The first self-propelled steam vehicles on rails were built in the early years of the nineteenth century. The Cornish engineer Richard Trevithick built a working steam locomotive that hauled ten tons of iron and seventy men along a nine-mile tramroad from Penydarren to the Merthyr Tydfil navigation on 21 February 1804, and he built a circular demonstration track, the “Catch-Me-Who-Can”, near Euston Square in London in 1808. The Trevithick locomotives were too heavy for the cast-iron plateway of the day, and they did not lead directly to the railway, but they demonstrated that a steam locomotive could run on rails.

The practical development of the steam locomotive was the work of the Tyneside engineers. William Hedley built the locomotive Puffing Billy for the Wylam colliery in 1813, and it remained in regular service for over fifty years. Timothy Hackworth, the locomotive superintendent of the Stockton and Darlington Railway, built a series of locomotives of increasing power, including the Locomotion No. 1 of 1825, which hauled the first train on the Stockton and Darlington line, and the Royal George of 1827. The Stockton and Darlington Railway, opened on 27 September 1825, was the first public railway in the world to use steam traction, although it also used horse-drawn vehicles, and its engineer was George Stephenson.

The engineer George Stephenson had built the locomotive Blucher for the Killingworth colliery in 1814, the Locomotion of 1825 for the Stockton and Darlington Railway, and a series of other locomotives. His son Robert Stephenson designed the Rocket of 1829, which won the Rainhill Trials and set the technical pattern for the modern steam locomotive. The Stockton and Darlington Railway used mixed traction, steam for the mineral trains and horses for the passenger traffic, and it was the Liverpool and Manchester Railway, opened on 15 September 1830, that was the first public railway to use steam traction exclusively.

The Liverpool and Manchester Railway

The Liverpool and Manchester Railway was promoted by the Liverpool merchant William Huskisson, the Member of Parliament for Liverpool, who was killed by the Rocket at the opening ceremony on 15 September 1830, and it was financed by a group of Liverpool and Manchester merchants who wanted to improve the transport of cotton between the two cities. The engineer of the railway was George Stephenson, who had been the engineer of the Stockton and Darlington Railway, and his son Robert Stephenson, who designed the Rocket. The railway was 31 miles long, and it ran from Liverpool to Manchester via a route that included the Sankey Viaduct, the Olive Mount cutting, and the Wapping tunnel. The railway was a triumph of the new Victorian Engineering Marvels, and it was the model for the great railway boom of the 1840s.

The Canterbury and Whitstable Railway, opened on 3 May 1830 under the engineer William James, was the first regular steam-powered passenger railway in the world, although the line was only six miles long and used cable haulage on the steeper sections. The Bolton and Leigh Railway, opened in 1828, and the Bolton and Kenyon Railway, also of 1828, were other early steam lines. By 1840, there were some 1,900 miles of railway open in Great Britain, by 1850 some 6,600 miles, and by 1870 some 15,000 miles. The railway network of the United Kingdom had largely reached its final extent by 1900, with some 22,000 miles of track.

The Rainhill Trials and the Rocket

The Rainhill Trials of October 1829 were the competition to choose the locomotive for the Liverpool and Manchester Railway. The trials were held at Rainhill, on a level stretch of the line, and the locomotives had to complete a series of runs under strict conditions. The Rocket, designed by Robert Stephenson, was the winner, and it became the prototype of the Victorian steam locomotive. The Rocket had several features that became standard on later locomotives: a multi-tubular boiler, a blast pipe that increased the draught through the fire, steeply inclined cylinders, and a tall smokestack. The Rocket reached a speed of 30 miles per hour in the trials, a remarkable performance for the time, and it set the pattern for the next century of steam locomotive design.

The Rocket itself was withdrawn from regular service in 1844, but its successors, the Northumbrian, the Phoenix, the North Star, the Comet, the Arrow, the Dart, and the Meteor, served on the Liverpool and Manchester Railway for many years. The principles of the Rocket, the multi-tubular boiler, the blast pipe, the coupling rods, and the cylinders, were carried forward into the next generation of locomotives, the Planet class of 1832, the Patentee class of 1833, and the long series of later designs. The story of the Rocket is part of the wider history of Victorian Inventions, and it is a defining case study in the history of the Victorian Engineering Marvels.

The Railway Boom of the 1840s

The Liverpool and Manchester Railway was an immediate success, and it set off a speculative boom in railway shares that lasted from 1844 to 1846. The Railway Boom in Victorian Britain of the 1840s saw the authorisation of several thousand miles of new railway, the foundation of several hundred railway companies, and a great surge of investment in the new technology. The boom collapsed in 1846, in the railway mania panic, and many of the new companies failed, but the main trunk lines, the Great Western, the London and North Western, the Midland, the Lancashire and Yorkshire, the North Eastern, and the Great Northern, were all established during the boom and were operating by the end of the decade.

The railway boom transformed the British landscape, the British economy, and British society. The new railways made possible the transport of coal, of iron, of cotton, of wool, of passengers, and of mail over long distances, and they made possible the construction of the new industrial cities of the Midlands, the North, and South Wales. The new railways also made possible the construction of the great Victorian Buildings and Landmarks of the period, including the great railway termini, the railway hotels, the railway bridges, and the railway viaducts. The London termini of the new railways were themselves substantial buildings: Euston (1837), Paddington (1838, rebuilt by Brunel in 1854), Waterloo (1848), King’s Cross (1852), Victoria (1860), Charing Cross (1864), Cannon Street (1866), St Pancras (1868), Liverpool Street (1874), and Marylebone (1899).

The Later Steam Locomotives

The Victorian period saw a long series of improvements in the design of the steam locomotive. The greatest of the Victorian locomotive engineers was Daniel Gooch, the locomotive superintendent of the Great Western Railway from 1837 to 1864, who designed a long series of broad-gauge locomotives, including the North Star of 1837, the Fire Fly of 1840, the Iron Duke of 1847, and the City of Truro of 1903, which was the first locomotive in the world to exceed 100 miles per hour. Other great Victorian locomotive engineers included Joseph Armstrong of the Midland Railway, who designed the Midland’s small-engine policy, Patrick Stirling of the Great Northern Railway, who designed the famous Stirling Singles, and Henry Ivatt of the Great Northern Railway, who designed the Atlantics. The Victorian steam locomotive was exported around the world. The British-built locomotives and the British-trained engineers who designed them built the railways of British Empire in the Victorian Era, from the Indian railways to the Australian railways, from the Canadian Pacific to the Cape Colony railways.