Five locomotives presented for the competition, run over the course of several days. Timothy Hackworth's "Sans Pareil" exceeded the maximum permitted weight, but was allowed to compete until it cracked a cylinder. Rainhill Station is one of the oldest stations in the world, opening a year after the Trials in The first record of substantial buildings at Rainhill were mentioned in a Board instruction to erect "a large waiting room" in , although the present building is much more than that.
The long, two-storey hipped-roof building has a pitched wrap-round canopy supported by arcades of segmental open cast-iron beams and highly decorated brackets between wooden posts. The building is formed from brick, with fluted stone door and window casing giving a delicate touch. In there were some miles of railway lines in Britain, but only a handful of steam locomotives.
Whilst they had been around for more than 15 years, locomotives were still relatively uncommon. Nevertheless, most railways continued to use either horses or stationary engines to haul wagons with cables and winches. Even in the late s, the triumph of the steam locomotive was far from inevitable. In , the Liverpool and Manchester Railway was nearing completion. Its chief objective was to provide a fast connection between the port of Liverpool and the Cottonopolis of Manchester.
The Directors of the railway had their reservations about the use of steam locomotives. Though their chief engineer, George Stephenson, was a keen advocate of the locomotive, he met opposition from several board members. In particular, they doubted the efficiency and reliability of the locomotives. Indeed, some of the locomotives on the Stockton and Darlington Railway proved unreliable and costly to maintain.
Illiterate at 17, a master of steam power in his 30s, and virtually a household name in his 40s, George Stephenson was a son of the northeastern coal fields. There were to be three judges, John Urpeth Rastrick, of Foster, Rastrick, and Company, and the curator of noteworthy locomotives such as Stourbridge Lion.
Judge two was Nicholas Wood, a familiar face for Stephenson, as Wood facilitated workings at the Killingworth colliery, where Stephenson first began experimenting with steam traction. The final judge, John Kennedy from Manchester, was heavily involved in the cotton industry, and a devout advocate for the railway. Maximum weight of the locomotive must be no greater than six tons, and its wheels must be sprung. To win the competition, the locomotives had to meet these requirements in addition to reaching 10 mph.
They must consume their own smoke. Steam pressure was not to exceed 50lb per square inch, but the Company reserved the right to test the boiler up to lb hydraulic. Clycloped was nothing more than a horse powered locomotive, where the horse powered the wheels by running on a treadmill. However, the horse fell through the wooden treadmill, and the design was disqualified. Burstall then spent five days repairing the locomotive, however, when he finally joined the competition, the locomotive reached only 6 mph, and the locomotive was quickly withdrawn.
Timothy Hackworth, who was a native of Wylam, and engaged in much experimentation of steam locomotives at the Wylam colliery, including notable locomotives such as Puffing Billy and Wylam Dilly. Railways had begun as wooden waggon ways or tramways carrying trucks and tubs drawn by horses or pushed and pulled by people.
Stephenson must have felt justifiable pride in his achievement, because he, more than anyone else, knew the political wrangling, chicanery, back-stabbing and epic failures that had littered the path to success before the first piece of track was even laid. A master engineer who had served his time developing steam engines for collieries in his native north-east, Stephenson had applied his skills to making important improvements to both stationary and locomotive engines.
Before joining the Liverpool and Manchester Railway as engineer, Stephenson had already gained experience of commercial railway development. He had been chief engineer on the Stockton and Darlington Railway, which, although not primarily a passenger carrying concern, had transported its directors and 21 waggon loads of people, as well as twelve goods waggons, behind a single locomotive on its inaugural journey in Stephenson and the directors of the Stockton and Darlington had to fight vested interests in the form of stagecoach owners and would-be canal developers, as well as opposition from local landowners.
They also had to contend with the fears of ordinary people who only saw job losses and all the other frightening changes that accompanied new technology. It created dangerous smoke and fumes that polluted the environment! The land would be ripped up, horses would be terrified — in fact, they would quickly go extinct now that the railway had stolen their jobs — and heaven knows what the effect of travelling at speeds of 20 miles an hour or more would do to the insides of the average human.
Robert Stephenson. And so, when Stephenson was hired by the directors of the Liverpool and Manchester Railway to survey and draw up the route of the proposed new line, he had some idea of what to expect. If anything, opposition was even more fierce on the western side of the Pennines, and getting the necessary bill through Parliament proved no easy affair. Then there was the issue of laying the track across the notorious bog of Chat Moss, where most of the naysayers said he was sure to come to grief.
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