Free George Stephenson by Hunter Davies

husband would shout. Then she would go back to her work beside the track, cutting the grass to feed her cows. She must have been a busy woman. It was also her job first thing in the morning at four o’clock to get up and light a fire in Blucher ’s grate to get the steam going.
    The Blucher was constantly developed as George Stephenson thought of new improvements. To try and get up more power and to lessen the noise of the escaping steam he turned the exhaust into the chimney and produced what became known as the blast pipe. Arguments raged for many years amongst the experts about whether this was Stephenson’s own idea, or if he had seen someone else doing it, or whether perhaps he’d discovered it by accident, not realising it would increase the steam power.
    Other developments on Blucher included new types of valves and the introduction of connecting rods on the wheels which solved some of the problems caused by having so many roughly made gears. This was the first use of such a system, a system which became a familiar sight on all steam engines for decades. Stephenson himself later abandoned it.
    Two other locomotives soon appeared incorporating the new devices, both with equally impressive names. One was named Wellington , for obvious reasons, and the other My Lord . This wasn’t a piece of religious genuflecting by Stephenson, who was never a churchgoer despite what many Victorians later liked to think. He was simply keeping in with his boss, Sir Thomas Liddell, who’d just been made Lord Ravensworth.
    Unlike so many engineers before him who had tended to concentrate on one side of locomotive making and give up when ancillary problems arose, Stephenson was all the time trying to develop suitably strong rails. His own engines, despite being lighter and faster, were still tearing up the track. His bosses allowed him to spend two days a week at a local Newcastle ironworks run by William Losh where he experimented on producing new types of rails. Together he and Losh patented their own make of cast iron rails and the whole of the Killingworth wagon way was relaid with them.
    Losh was a highly cultivated gentleman, a friend of Humboldt, the great German naturalist and explorer who was currently being read and followed with great excitement by most of England’s educated classes. Losh was known throughout Tyneside and was one of the leading gentleman defenders of George during the safety lamp row. For George’s two days a week at his ironworks Losh paid him £l00 per annum – which didn’t affect George’s £100 a year from the Grand Allies, though it reduced his time with them. George had therefore good reason to be grateful to William Losh.
    The success of his Killingworth engines and his Losh–Stephenson rails led to a demand for similar lines elsewhere. Over the next five or six years Stephenson built sixteen engines at Killingworth, most being used locally but some going to Scotland in 1817 for the Duke of Portland’s wagon way from Kilmarnock to Troon.
    The first entirely new line laid out by George Stephenson was begun in 1819 at Hetton colliery, near Newcastle. It was eight miles long and three fixed engines provided the motive power over a hilly one-and-a-half-mile stretch, self-acting planes for three miles and the rest consisted of locomotives. There’s a most elaborate description of the Hetton line by two German engineers who devoted twenty-two pages to it in a book they brought out in 1826. (A French translation came out in 1830.) They not only quoted Stephenson’s measurements for each length, they paced each section out by foot to make sure he was right.
    Engineers were soon coming from all over the country to see the Killingworth engines. Robert Stevenson, grandfather of Robert Louis, an eminent civil engineer in Edinburgh, wrote in 1818 that ‘Some of the most striking improvements in the system of railways are the patent inventions of Mr