Steam through history, as we take a ride on the very first locomotive engine.
In early June, I travelled to County Durham to meet a mechanical wonder, up there with the printing press, the lightbulb and penicillin. Originally dubbed Active, later renamed Locomotion No. 1, at first glance she doesn’t look very avant-garde, more antic and unlikely. Barrel-bodied and pugnacious – umbrage on wheels.
Built in 1825 by ‘father of railways’ George Stephenson, Locomotion was the first steam locomotive to pull a passenger-carrying train on a public line, the Stockton and Darlington Railway. If it looks a bit Heath Robinson today, that’s because it was a hybrid machine – part-pump, part-dynamo, a high-pressure haulier, part-dray horse, part-dragon; all utility.
A spectacular success, the engine was a sensation. She arguably birthed a new age, inspiring a technological sea change akin to the space race; progress so rapid and prodigious that Locomotion was a relic within five years.
By the time you’re reading this, all being well, a replica of Locomotion will have run along as much of the Stockton and Darlington Railway, as still exists, as part of the bicentennial celebrations of her first journey.
In preparation for that once-in-a-lifetime jaunt, tomorrow she’ll lead a test train the 16 miles between Stanhope and Bishop Auckland and I’ve been invited along.
When I first visit the shed where Locomotion lives, she is in the process of being fired up by three volunteers – although that’s perhaps too energetic a description of three boiler-suited men who are hand-feeding coal briquettes into the firebox to gently warm the engine and get a bit of pressure up ahead of time. It’s an unhurried, good-humoured process with as much time spent laughing as making steam.
But interweaved with the banter is a touching respect and affection for the machine simmering before them. One of the engineers responsible for repairing the locomotive makes the point that, to travel behind it in 1825, ‘to see it go past, even’, would have been comparable to witnessing the Saturn V rocket blast off. For all that, he described it as ‘more like alchemy than engineering’.
‘And it is like those Apollo missions inasmuch as it’s all stripped back, arrowed towards that one aim. That was getting to the moon and back, this was changing the face of transporting materials and people in bulk, at speed. So you’ve got all the working essentials on show: no cladding, insulation or bodywork; no comfort. The driver’s up there on that running board, side on to the direction of travel. The fireman’s down here, feeding the fire. It’s a dangerous setup but it’s amazing how much they got right. Everything else followed from this.’
The original loco, or something like it – the train of Theseus / Trigger’s Locomotion – now lives in a museum. The modern doppelgänger I’m looking at and set to ride behind is a little different.
In outline it’s recognisably 1825, but to conform with 2025 mainline standards, the engine and rolling stock needed to be brought up to date with modern equipment, such as brakes. This mix of old and new has resulted in some strange juxtapositions: the brakes necessitate a small compressor (hidden in one of the wagons – another carries a supplementary water supply); the three trucks and carriage have roller bearings and a chassis of metal rather than wood; two 20th-century safety valves simmer behind the loco’s chimney; the train has an electricity supply; each vehicle carries a first-aid kit and a fire extinguisher.
Yet to all intents and purposes, in nature, at heart and soul, this is a Georgian locomotive, a 200-year-old apparition. Napoleon’s defeat at the Battle of Trafalgar happened 20 years prior, the Battle of Waterloo only ten. ‘Mad’ King George III has been dead five years. Now this – a radical monster drawing tonnes of coal from pit to port, more and faster than ever before. And not only coal, but people too. George Stephenson’s great leap forward.
Four years later, George’s son, Robert, would design The Rocket, and win the Rainhill Trials, marking the start of mainline steam. One year later, on 23 November, 1830, No. 9 Planet shrank the 30 miles between Liverpool and Manchester to an hour. By the mid-1840s, Great Western expresses were touching 80mph. Between 1845 and 1900, £3 billion was spent on railway expansion, equivalent to £216.5 billion today.
By the end of Queen Victoria’s reign, Britain’s trains had carried more than one billion passengers. The world had changed, and it started here.
Walking around Locomotion the morning of the run, it was boiling and pressurised, primed and potent, I find her composition fascinating. The front and back of the main drum feature rivets. Welding didn’t really exist when she was created, so her fixings and joints vary between the cutting-edge Georgian and the age-old, tried and trusted.
The wrought iron connecting rods (the pioneering coupling rods of the wheels) are linked to the crossheads above by means of gibs and cotters – wood joints in metal, essentially; tapers, wedges and pins. Elsewhere, the world over, you’d find them in timber-framed barns; here, they turn the up and down of Locomotion’s humpback cylinders into revolutionary round and round.
The wheels are each formed of two cast parts held together with wooden wedges – a fusion that encapsulates the material and technical limits of the time. These four roulette roundels support the engine’s cylindrical body from which rises a Pompidou of cylinders, beams, pumps and levers; safety valves, balance weights, handles, cocks and taps.
But later, riding along behind as she huffs and flutters across County Durham, all this coalesces into a wonderfully balanced, musical totality.
I’m one of a number of guests standing in replica coal wagons recently built to form the 200th anniversary train. And as soon as we get moving it becomes apparent that to ride with Locomotion is to grin with delight because, as well as being a prime mover in terms of innovation, this machine is the most amazing fun. So we all grin as we rattle along, and the fields pass, rails clack, the driver’s bell rings, safety valves pop. We must look manic but the whole thing’s anarchic and feels strangely subversive – just as it surely must have two centuries ago.
On the move, Locomotion conjures something of the orrery. Up top, a syncopated sewing machine; lower down, a whirl of eccentric somersaults. In motion, the engine makes sense, singing as it works in a buoyant voice both soft and sure. How fast are we going? Ten, 12 miles an hour? How amazing that must have been 200 years ago; as fast as a horse, but for miles and miles. Never tiring, always eager, an elemental elephantine slogger, driver on her shoulder like a proud mahout, smoke drifting over the fields in her wake. Steaming at speed, Locomotion must have been a staggering vision of the future.
Why do this?
Why run a cloned steam train along old tracks?
Is it just nostalgia, that British compulsion to live in the past?
I don’t think so, at least not straightforwardly so. Nobody here wants to live in 1825. Rather, these anniversary outings act as both celebration and salutation, a way of shrinking the distance between then and now by means of a steam-powered time machine.
As a child I had clockwork trains, passed down from my grandfather.
A bedroom loop of O Gauge double track, a tinplate tender loco, red, pulling three carriages in shades of Pullman brown. I remember the clatter and whizz of the set as it circled. The weight of the metal engine with its spring-loaded innards. The resistance and ratchet of the big key as it torqued the mechanism. The two control knobs jutting out of the cab on wires – Start/Stop, Forwards/Backwards (either way: Full Speed). The gleeful whirr as it picked up pace before finding a regular click-clack rhythm until, after a minute, its orbits would slow and it would ghost to a halt – often under the bed, so I’d have to crawl after it, key in hand.
This too was alchemy rather than science. Nobody surely knew how the trains worked. You wound up the engine, engaged the gears and off it went until it was exhausted. There was something ancient and elemental at play. Talking about it to somebody recently, they asked if I was ever minded to take the train apart… and I felt a strange mix of confusion and revulsion.
‘No,’ I said. ‘No, not really.’ Really I meant ‘NO! What’s wrong with you?’
Because from the earliest age, I knew there was joy in mystery, and I’ve learned that magic and amazement are synonymous. I couldn’t explain it then, but as I’ve grown older, I’ve come to understand that it has to do with ideas of soul.
A piece of music or writing, a voice; a taste, a sight, a sound, a smell can transport and connect us in ways so immediate that only words like epiphany and revelation will do. Such moments can be doors to connection and empathy, deepening and enriching our sense of individual identity and place in a wider scheme.
‘Today’s run is to train the drivers, make sure everything works, and put the engine through its paces,’ one of the organisers told me during a stop to check Locomotion’s lubrication levels, ‘but it’s also a reward for all the people who’ve helped make this happen – the volunteers who have given their time, the people who’ve sponsored the works and kit to get this train on the mainline come September… but it’s also to celebrate having done it. The fact it’s here, and it works.’
He looks down the platform, taking in the scene.
‘And it’s only by doing this, doing it properly, making her go, that you appreciate what they did 200 years ago.’
It’s alive, I suggest.
‘It’s alive,’ he agrees. ‘It’s alive. And it means the world.’
