Locomotives of the Liverpool and Manchester Railway

The Liverpool & Manchester Railway was Britain’s first mainline, inter-city railway; opened in 1830 it was at the cutting edge of railway technology. Engineered by George Stephenson and his team - John Dixon, William Allcard, Joseph Locke - the project faced many obstacles both before and after opening, including local opposition and the choice of motive power, resulting in the Rainhill Trials of 1829. Much of the success of the line can be attributed to the excellence of its engineering but also its fleet of pioneering locomotives built by Robert Stephenson & Co. of Newcastle. This is the story of those locomotives, and the men who worked on them, at a time when the locomotive was still in its infancy. Using extensive archival research, coupled with lessons learned from operating early replica locomotives such as Rocket and Planet, Anthony Dawson explores how the locomotive rapidly developed in response to the demands of the first inter-city railway, and some of the technological dead ends along the way. AUTHOR: Anthony Dawson is an historian and archaeologist with over ten years’ experience of working in museums and heritage, having worked for the Museum of the Manchester Regiment and the Science & Industry Museum in Manchester, home to the world’s oldest passenger railway station. He is a Railway Volunteer at S&IM and the NRM, working as a fireman on the unique replica of Robert Stephenson’s Planet. A graduate of the University of Bradford and a post-graduate research student at the University of Leeds, Anthony is also a member of the Railway & Canal Historical Society and the Newcomen Society. He has written extensively on early railways, and is the author of The Liverpool & Manchester Railway: An Operating History (Pen & Sword 2020). 40 colour and b/w illustrations