The year 2025 is a special year for train travel, as it marks 200 years since the first public railway with steam locomotives, which was also the first time that a significant number of passengers could travel by train. There will be lots of events across the UK to mark the anniversary and historic locomotives will be launched. How was this railway made? What obstacles were there to overcome?
Stockton – Darlington, the world’s first railway served by locomotives
The first steam locomotives were built shortly after 1800, but it took several decades before the world was convinced that locomotives, and not horses, should pull wagons. These early locomotives could be outrun by running men, broke down quickly, and were extremely heavy, so the rails sometimes broke. The railway industry was still in its infancy, but it would advance enormously and change the world.
Until 1825, few people had the opportunity to travel by train because only a few locomotives were built and there were no long-distance railways. The construction of the “Stockton and Darlington Railway” in the north-east of England was to change everything. It must be remembered that this railway was built to transport coal and was able to become profitable. But it was also the ideal opportunity to test the reaction of passengers and to show that the train has a future if some technical aspects are improved.
Many industrialists in Great Britain had the idea after 1820 to build a railway from Darlington to Stockton to reduce the price of transporting coal considerably and to shorten the time. There was also a competing project to build a canal, but it would be very expensive and not very cost effective.
George Stephenson, who went down in history as the “Father of Railways” for the reliable locomotives he built, led a complicated project that saw 60 km of lines.
In the survey of the field, George Stephenson was also assisted by his son Robert who was 18 years old in 1821. A big step forward from the experimental railways of the 1810s was that the lines were kept and no longer broken under locomotives. Without the use of quality wrought iron, the railway of 1825 could not have been a success, but until that success many attempts were made that ended (sometimes) badly.
In the volume “A brief history of trains” – signed by Christian Wolmar – it is explained that the line between the two cities was not easy to build, because it passed through a marshy area and a river had to be crossed, so for the first time, Stephenson had to find engineering solutions to overcome the obstacles. The swamp was filled with many tons of broken stone, and an architect built a stone bridge over the river.
A line that caused many problems
The work took three years, and in 1825 the inaugural run was made by a locomotive built in the Stephenson factory, Locomotion No. 1, which carried 34 wagons carrying goods and 600 passengers on the inaugural run. The Stockton and Darlington Railway (S&DR) was 42 km long. The maximum possible speed was 24 km/h and the locomotive weighed more than six tons.
The big problem was that Stephenson’s locomotives were unreliable and broke down often, so the owners still relied heavily on horse traction. Some trains had both freight and passenger cars.
The line was not double and so there were few places with “loops” where two trains from the opposite direction could pass simultaneously. As there were no clear traffic rules, because there was no place with heavy rail traffic, there were also cases where the mechanics argued to decide who should cross first.
In addition, the managers of the “railway” made the mistake of letting people come online with various improvised trains that were extremely dangerous and often lead to accidents, it is also written in the book “A brief history of trains “.
There were 42 km between the two cities and the coal could be transported quickly from the mine to the port and a model was created that would be replicated many times. Within a year of the opening of the line, the price of transporting coal fell by more than 50% on the distance between the two cities, since it could be moved faster, easier and in larger quantities.
It should not be forgotten that everything happened in 1825, that is, a long time ago. By comparison, the first railway on the current territory of Romania operated three decades later, and the first locomotive built in Reșita ran after 1870.
The wool merchant with bright ideas
The line would not have existed without the efforts of a Darlington wool merchant, Edward Pease.
Pease remains famous for a quote: “Leave the country and build the railroads, and the railroads will build the country.” As mammoth projects with thousands of km of railway lines in the United States of America, Canada or Russia will prove, trains have actively contributed to the expansion of countries and the foundation of cities that will become very large thanks to the economic “boom” generated by existence. of the railway.
A chronicler noted in 1825 that, for the first time, man is faster over long distances than animals such as horses, foxes or rabbits, writes Bill Laws, in the volume “Fifty Railroads That Changed the course of history”.
On a much more serious note, Bill Laws explains that the line is also important because it was a “launching pad” for the famous engineer George Stephenson, who showed that he knew what he was doing and had good ideas. In just five years, he would develop much more reliable and faster locomotives that would make it clear that these machines were the future of land transport.
But the line from Darlington to Stockton has remained in history mainly because of the 1,435 mm gauge which is now used on railways in most countries of the world. Another essential thing: the line proved to be profitable and set an example that many communities followed.
And after the success of 1825, a key problem remained: the locomotives had a low speed due to an insufficient amount of steam produced by the boilers, and it was tried, for example, without much success in the first years, to equip the boiler with calibrated. pipes placed at the base of the chimney, through which the steam comes out of the cylinders under pressure.
The first railway in the true sense of the word, built for the transport of passengers, opened in 1830, between two large industrial cities: Manchester and Liverpool, also in England.
Photo source: Dreamstime.com
