← Dan Snow's History Hit
Dan Snow's History Hit
The First Trains
00:35:05
The origins of Britain's railways and the first passenger train journey.
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- [00:00]
Dan Snow
Hello folks. Dan Snow here. I am throwing a party to celebrate 10 years of Dan Snow's history. I'd love for you to be there. Join me for a very special live recording of the podcast in London in England on 12th September to celebrate the 10 years. You can find out more about it. Get tickets with the link in the show notes. Look forward to seeing you there.
- [00:27]
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- [00:57]
Steven Brindle
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- [01:27]
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- [02:02]
Dan Snow
On 27 September 1825, a bizarre a brilliant contraption billowing steam and smoke, traveled down a track from the collieries near Shildon, County Durham, in the north of England, through Darlington to the port of Stockton on Tees. There was such a buzz about it, such excitement, that 300 passengers had bought tickets to go on this train ride. But in the end, she pulled probably twice that, as well as 11 wagons of coal. This astounded eyewitnesses. They thought it was brilliant. They thought it was bewildering. They knew that they were getting a glimpse into the future. This was the very first passenger steam train, Locomotion number One, a steam train devised by the brilliant engineer George Stephenson to move coal and people over long distances smoothly and reliably. As well as the passengers, there were plenty more people who turned up that day. Onlookers walked the length of the 25 mile track to catch a look at this new fangled machine. Affectionately, people referred to it as an iron horse. These onlookers waved their hats and their handkerchiefs and they cheered themselves hoarse. Locomotion traveled at about 12 miles an hour. And the passengers who were lucky enough to ride described the sensation of moving so quickly. It was exhilarating. It was unsettling. It was history being made. The world would never be the same again. Now, this September in 2025 marks the 200th anniversary of that landmark journey, the beginning of the Stockton Darlington Railway, which would go on to carry millions more passengers over the centuries. Not to mention all of the other railways that grew out from it. The story of the railway in Britain is a story of the nation's industrialization and modernization. Initially devised for coal fields to get coal to market, they were perfected by men like George Stephenson. Isambard Kingdom Brunel, of course, were still making better and faster trains than ever before. And those railways shrank distances. They sped up trade and communication. They revolutionized daily life. They fueled industrial growth. They linked factories and ports with raw materials. Cities grew enormously as people could flock to them and fresh food could be brought in regularly from the countryside. Railways gave people new mobility and leisure opportunities. Britain became the workshop of the world, not the crucible for this explosion of railways. Britain's railways were exported across the Empire and beyond. They carried British goods. They carried British influence. Though sadly, in more recent decades, they've been challenged by cars and planes. The railways remain a symbol of that first great spasm of the Industrial Revolution, as well as being a symbol of Britain's ingenuity and the transformation it unleashed on the planet. To tell that story, I'm joined by friend of the podcast historian Steven Brindle. This is Dan Snow's history hit and we're talking about the big anniversary of the first passenger carrying train. Enjoy.
- [05:21]
Steven Brindle
T minus 10 atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima. God save the King. No black white unity till there is first some black unity.
- [05:30]
Commercial Advertiser 2
Never to go to war with one another again.
- [05:32]
Dan Snow
And liftoff.
- [05:34]
Steven Brindle
And the shuttle has cleared the tower.
- [05:37]
Dan Snow
Stephen, thank you very much for coming on the podcast.
- [05:41]
Steven Brindle
Thank you, Dan. Always a pleasure.
- [05:42]
Dan Snow
I think it's always really important, isn't it, to emphasize that there had been railways and there had also Been steam engines. It was the marrying together of marrying of the two thing.
- [05:51]
Steven Brindle
Yeah.
- [05:51]
Dan Snow
Tell me about pre steam or pre locomotion trackways railways, because they were quite.
- [05:58]
Steven Brindle
Common, weren't they, from the late 16th century? People who ran quarries and mines and ironworks needed to carry very heavy loads around, basically masses of stone. And they found that it was much easier to do. So if you could make a wagon which had metal rims and which might have a metal flange to run on rails. It's a matter of minimizing the friction, Dan, because your wagon's going to be pulled by a horse. So if you minimise the friction and keep the surface as smooth as possible, your horse will be able to pull a lot more than it would in a regular cart and a regular road which would be about sort of nine, 10, mud. And so there were horse drawn tramways in use at hundreds of mines and quarries and ironworks all over England and Wales and into Scotland. Yes.
- [06:53]
Dan Snow
And I suppose it's the extractive industries that are leading in that, because you can lay down those tramways. Because you need to get from coalface to the River Tyne, wherever that coal, that cargo is going to get put on ships and then moved around the east osa.
- [07:08]
Steven Brindle
You need to get from an ironworks to a canal or to a road or preferably to a staith or quay. And in particular you need to get coal to a quayside. And so all over northeast England there were collieries which had trackways and tramways. And engineers also in the late 18th century learned how to make these things called inclined planes, where you make a sort of sloping structure to go down a slope and you lay parallel tracks so that a heavy wagon going down can pull the empty one back up. And you need a gearing system and an axle at the top and the brakeman to work it. So they were building all that kind of thing. Yes, in the late 18th and early 19th centuries.
- [07:54]
Dan Snow
So that's clever. That's a gravity fed system. As one goes up, the other comes down.
- [07:58]
Steven Brindle
Yeah.
- [07:58]
Dan Snow
There's a sort of parallel revolution going on in heat engines, I suppose we call them. And that's what from the beginning of the 18th century.
- [08:08]
Steven Brindle
Yes.
- [08:08]
Dan Snow
People have worked out that the power of heating water to create steam. Everyone will have heard of steam engines. What is it that's so useful about steam?
- [08:17]
Steven Brindle
Well, steam expands, it fills a much higher volume than the water and the air of which it's composed. And so you can use the expansion of the steam to produce pressure and the pressure will push the A piston will push a plate up the cylinder, which pushes a piston only you then have to condense the steam to produce a vacuum to pull the plate back down. And so early steam engines, right up to the 1770s, what were called atmospheric engines, that is, they worked at very little, not much above atmospheric pressure. And you had to have a condenser, you had to condense the steam and pull it back down. So they worked on a very slow cycle, on a very slow stroke. Although they could be quite powerful, all they could do basically was generate an up and down motion so you could pump water with them. If you attach lots and lots of poles together, you could get a pumping action down into a pump sump at the bottom of the mine and that would pump water up. And so the first great use for atmospheric engines, as invented by Thomas Savery and Thomas Newcomen, was to pump water out of deep mines. Was mostly they did, and they were very inefficient, of course, but that's all they had. But as England's demand for coal grew greater, the mines got deeper and the mines became more and more inclined to flood, which obviously would shut your operation completely. So this was crucial. And in the 1770s, a very brilliant Scotsman called James Watt realized that the key to a better engine was to send the spent steam to a separate vessel called a condenser denser. And that meant you could speed up the whole process and also up the pressure at which it ran. And the Bolton and Watt engine, which was patented in the 1770s, was a step forward. And so in the late 18th century, various people around the country were looking how to compete with Boulton and Watt, who really were the standard setters and make better engines.
- [10:28]
Dan Snow
Humans have been harnessing even the tide, but the tidal power, kinetic movement, wind power, rivers, water power, steam engines allow you to create energy, so to do the work of many humans, but sort of anywhere, because you can build this engine and feed coal into it, you don't have to worry about if you're getting a good breeze or there's a river nearby.
- [10:46]
Steven Brindle
Yes, absolutely. Boulton and Watt's first engine, patented 1774, was still basically a pumping engine which had a beam on top, what they call a beam engine. And all it could do, really, was to push up and pull down. That is a pumping action. But in 1780, Watt worked out how to redesign his engine to drive an axle, that is to generate fixed rotary motion. Now, in the past, fixed rotary motion for industrial purposes, grinding corn or blowing a furnace bellows or whatever had only been achievable by wind power, water power, human or animal power. And now you could generate rotary motion for as long as you light, and actually much more powerfully using steam power. And so Watt's second patent was really a momentous step for all of humankind. And without that, the steam locomotive would not have been possible, because a steam engine had to be able to turn an axle for a steam locomotive to be possible. And even so, it took another 20 years.
- [11:51]
Dan Snow
And then you get this phenomenon, don't you, the static steam engine. So again, on these trackways, it had been horse and human and gravity powered, but then you get these remarkable trackways where you have a steam engine but it's static and it's just hauling these carts along.
- [12:05]
Steven Brindle
Yep. So you get places, especially iron works like Pen Y Darren Ironworks, run by Samuel Humphrey, was one where a lot of early innovations happened, where they thought, well, we have steam engines and we know how to build steam engines, so instead of using horses, we could, especially if we had a slight slope, we could use a static steam engine to let our trucks down and pull them back up again, that kind of thing. And as well as a parallel fleet to the inclined planes. And so people are starting to use fixed steam engines to pull loads as well. And then this extraordinary man called Richard Trevithick comes along right at the end of the 18th century, beginning of the 19th, and he really invented the steam locomotive.
- [12:54]
Dan Snow
Well, yes, this is the bit, Steven, where you and I get all the death threats from various steam fans. We have to be very careful to whom we ascribe various breakthroughs here, don't we? I did a TV show once and didn't mention Trevithick, and I'm still living down the shelf.
- [13:08]
Steven Brindle
Well, we better not do that again, because he was a marvellous man.
- [13:11]
Dan Snow
Trevithick has the idea that these steam engines could move around under their own power.
- [13:17]
Steven Brindle
Yes, he did. Don't really know how he worked that out. He was a mining engineer, son of a mine captain, brilliant with machinery. And Trevithick patented a high pressure cylinder steam engine in 1799, which was an advance on the Bolton Water model. And he reasoned then that if you could put it on a wheeled chassis, you could get it to move under its own steam. And he built a steam carriage which should have been like sort of a traction engine, which he exhibited in London, 1803. But the first one we know really worked was built for Samuel Humfray at the Pen Y Darren Ironworks in south Wales in 1804. And this one pulled five tons of iron for ten miles at a stately two and a half miles an hour.
- [14:01]
Dan Snow
And that was the world's first locomotive hauled railway journey indeed.
- [14:06]
Steven Brindle
Pen y Darren 1804, Wales takes the prize. And Trevithick put on a public demonstration with his, probably his fourth locomotive, the Catch Me who Can.
- [14:17]
Dan Snow
And I love that name, the Catch.
- [14:18]
Steven Brindle
Me who Can probably went about five miles an hour and he exhibited it at a site just about on the site of euston Station in 1808-9. And there were engravings which showed this sort of circular inclusion, this circular track, a bit like one of those children's miniature railways you see in shopping centres. And it went round and round and round. But Trevithick's whole problem was that he was an absolute pioneer. He had virtually no backup, he had no big investor behind him and his locomotives were slow, unreliable and had tendency to have accidents. There was one occasion, I think one of them was moving steam locomotives. They stocked at a pub and they had too good a lunch and I think they forgot to manage the boiler fire or put more water in and the boiler burnt dry and caught fire. And Trevithick, not only did he not make money out of his inventions, he was actually bankrupted. In 1811-14 and 1816 he went to work as a mining engineer in South America and his career ended in absolute tragedy. It's terribly sad story because his engines weren't quite reliable enough to attract large scale support and without large scale support, he couldn't afford the work to develop and perfect them, which I'm quite sure he could have done.
- [15:33]
Dan Snow
No, and he did, if you like, develop them, if not entirely perfect them. But George Stephenson, indeed, while we're on the subject, what's going on in Britain at the time, how are these unschooled men, from what we could describe as the lowest rungs of society, almost all seems a bit meritocratic. They're able to develop, they're able to teach themselves, find investments. We're told this is a very hierarchical society and yet there's something exciting going on in Britain at the time. These people are able to thrive, to build businesses, to develop engineering and scientific solutions. What's in the water in this age?
- [16:05]
Steven Brindle
You've absolutely hit on something crucial about Georgian England. Georgian prison there, Dan, in that we tend to view it through these literary, artistic eyes and see there's a snobbish, leisured, no romantic artistic qualities, but underneath that it was a very, very dynamic economy where the state took only about 10% of GDP. And where there was a very driven middle class of businessmen, bankers and entrepreneurs who really wanted to make money. And there were very, very few legal impediments to them making money. There were no restrictions on how you employ people, no trade unions, there were no monopolies of any many kinds. And there was the legal system, which if you got entangled in it, could be pretty sticky. But if you were sure of your property, then your property was yours and contracts were enforceable at law. And all of that was crucial, really. And the middle class people who were excellent at managing money and prepared to work 10, 12, 14 hour days, what they needed was people who were good with their hands and could manage the staff and were prepared to work 10, 12, 14 hour days, which is where people like Richard Trevithick and George Stephenson, if you made a reputation and got the investors to trust you, then you could really get on. They were still the bosses, you were still the mechanic. But in George's case, he was so successful that he died as a very rich man, which portrait of it did not.
- [17:37]
Dan Snow
So George Stephenson was born in 1781 ish, son of a coal miner, just went to work with his dad in the colliery as a teenager, 14 years old. Just worked as well because he was adept, he was a good machinist, he.
- [17:50]
Steven Brindle
Was naturally brilliant with his hands and he had an instinct for machinery, like for the thick. And he became an assistant engineer at Killingworth Colliery. And he was responsible for managing various pieces of machinery, but including the fixed engines which pump the water out of the mine and which wound the caged with miners up and down and the ore out. So that was a big responsibility, was their lives were in your hands and he was doing that as a teenager.
- [18:14]
Dan Snow
Was he aware of the work Trevithick was doing? Did he knowingly build on what had gone before? Or was it just something that the whole country was abuzz with?
- [18:21]
Steven Brindle
No, this would have been. This was before Trevithick had actually produced his locomotives. I mean, George was born in 1781. The Penny Darren locomotive was 1804. So those hadn't actually happened at this stage. But the country was full of businesses starting using steam engines and manufacturers trying to make the steam engines better, to sell more of them. George himself was completely uneducated. He was illiterate. And as a teenager he knew that if he was going to get on in the world, he would have to do what his father had never done and learn to read and write. And he paid from his wages to go to night school and learnt to read and write. That's one measure of the man. As a teenager, he did that. He redesigned the collier engine of Killingworth and he made it more efficient. And the colliery was owned by a sort of consortium of coal owners called the Grand Allies. And they noticed. They noticed what an asset he was and they trusted him. And he became a sort of consultant who'd go and fix mechanical problems in the area. And he'd really done that by the time he was in his 20s. So he was known and trusted and he'd been working every hour God gave, making engines, running engines for the Grand Allies in the northeast of England in County Durham.
- [19:38]
Dan Snow
And then we get that phenomenon that we're very familiar with in today's revolution that we've all lived through, which is the importance of venture capital, I suppose, investors, if you want to get new stuff off the ground.
- [19:47]
Steven Brindle
Yes, absolutely. In winning the trust of the Grand Allies, he'd won a really major battle there. And so they gave him the resources. In 1814, they let him use some of the company's money to build a steam locomotive. He have heard of Pen Y Darren, which, after all, had happened in 1804, and he'd have heard of Catch Me who Can. I don't know if he'd seen either of them, it seems, but he would have seen engravings. And his was actually based on an engine made by another man called Matthew Murray, who's rather the forgotten figure in all this. Murray was a much more successful engineer than Trevithick, and he partnered with substantial ironworks and they made machinery for textile mills in Yorkshire. And Murray had made an engine called Salamanca in 1812 for a colliery called Leeds, and that was the first really commercially successful one. The problem with the Salamanca was it run on what was called a rack system, that it had a toothed wheel which connected with a toothed rail. So that was all very complicated to make and maintain. And George thought, well, this toothed rail business, I mean, how are you going to make all that and maintain it and stop it cracking? So he built his locomotive, the Blucher, and he made sure that instead it had flanged wheels, that is, wheels which had a flange which went down and sort of held it onto the rails instead of a tooth wheel. And so it was much more efficient and powerful than Murray's. And that was a crucial step forward. Once he'd built Blucher at killingworth, and in 1820, he built a whole new colliery railway at a place called Hetton, run by gravity and stationary Engines and locomotive. Wow.
- [21:24]
Dan Snow
So it's just constant evolution, constant improvement. At some stage though, they think to themselves, we're going to create a railway as we might understand it in the modern sense. And presumably these colliery railways, well they're for just moving things around inside the collier. It's just a sort of regional ambition. You really can get from one place to a quite different distinct place some distance away.
- [21:45]
Steven Brindle
The grand allies who owned Killingworth would have owned several relatively short colliery tramways. And then the Hetton colliery railway was built which was eight miles long, which would have been a very long one by the standards of the age. But the Durham coal owners had a wider problem in that a lot of the best coal fields in Durham were quite well inland in the area around Bishop Auckland. And they needed to get their coal either to the Tyne to the north or to the Tees to the south. And actually with a Tees, much easier. And so this could either mean a colliery tramway or a canal. But the topography was tricky and it was problematic for either tramway or a canal. And a Welsh engineer called George Overton was consulted and he said, I think given this of country, you had you want a tram road. And the company eventually was set up by a public meeting in Darlington 1818. And that would say, well, a canal's probably too difficult, but we are going to build a tram road from the middle of County Durham all the way to tees, 25 miles.
- [22:51]
Dan Snow
So it's not hugely different in its sort of theory to the one at the Hetton colliery, but it is three times as long.
- [22:57]
Steven Brindle
Yeah, three times as long. And in this case the crucial figure who made the Stockton and Darlington railway take off was a banker called Edward Pease of Darlington. And the Pease's were Quakers. And there were several English cities which had smaller colonies of Quaker businessmen. Quakers were pacifists, deeply devout people who generally kept themselves themselves, but they had a well deserved reputation for absolute honesty and probity in their dealings. And so Edward became the key figure in making the Stockton and Darlington work. Two thirds of the shares were sold locally and the rest were sold to Quakers nationally through Edward and his connection. So it was set up by a network of Quaker bankers really because no one else could put up the money. And it was known as a Quaker undertaking. And they knew that to make the railway they'd have to take property, they'd have to go over all sorts of people's property and they would need an act of Parliament and they didn't get in with the right landowners. The Earl of Elton and the Earl of Darlington, who thought it would interfere with their fox hunting. And so they opposed the first bill, which fell in 1819, and a second bill was introduced into Parliament for a slightly different route, and that passed in 1821. And the idea of the Stockton and Darlington Railway when it opened was that it would be like a turnpike road, that they'd make a tramway, and anyone who owned or built a suitable wagon for coal could use it for a toll. So it wasn't envisaged at the outset as being like a railway company which would own its rolling stock. So they were still thinking of it as being a bit more like a turnpike road.
- [24:44]
Dan Snow
Listen down to Know's history at More on Trains after this.
- [24:56]
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- [25:54]
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- [26:23]
Steven Brindle
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Steven Brindle
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- [26:53]
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- [27:35]
Dan Snow
Is it George Stephenson who said, no, this needs to be, you know, moving steam engines, Locomotive steam engines.
- [27:41]
Steven Brindle
Well, yes, it was, but Pease and his Quaker investors thought, who is going to build this for us? And they certainly weren't thinking in terms of steam locomotives at all. I mean, steam locomotives were this sort of weird thing, like that funny Cornish guy exhibited in London once. And isn't the one as a colliery somewhere? And that wouldn't really be in anyone's mental map.
- [28:04]
Dan Snow
And they keep blowing up.
- [28:05]
Steven Brindle
They keep blowing up and catching fire. No, we'll have safe old horses and we'll just pay for the oats. And they invited George because he was known as a man who could make things and get things done. So local entrepreneurs set up a company, the Quakers take it over and make it fly and get the act of Parliament. And then Edward Pease thinks this Overton guy doesn't really know what he's doing. And George Stephenson really seems like a man who knows how to make and maintain things. And he invited George to come and see him in 1821, I think after they actually got the act of Parliament and George surveyed a new route, he found a shorter route for it. He recommended malleable wrought iron rails, not cast iron rails. And he's appointed engineer with a really princely salary of £660 in January 1822. And that shows how far he'd already risen in the world. And in mid-1822, he took Edward Pease to Killingworth to watch his locomotive Blucher in action. And that's the moment at which I think George sold the idea of steam locomotion to Edward Pease.
- [29:14]
Dan Snow
What a moment. What a moment. What has George got to do? Is he. Presumably he wants to build a better locomotive, but is that the main challenge? Or is the laying of the track in itself and overcoming geographical obstacles, is that an equal engineering challenge?
- [29:26]
Steven Brindle
Oh, I'd have thought that for George, there were lots of unknowns to tackle in making 25 miles of tramroad. I mean, that was really another scale to anything which anyone had attempted. Canal engineers had made much longer canals than that. That was certainly true, but he hadn't. And he knew that he would have to keep his line very, very level, because if he was going to be used by horses, a horse can't really pull a very heavy load up much of a slope at all. And you don't really want much of a downhill slope either. So one of the engineering challenges would be the surveying challenge of keeping his route very, very level. And every time you intersected with an existing right of way, you'd have to go under it or over it or have a level crossing and you'd be dividing lots of farms, so you'd have to have accommodation crossings, all of them. And there were all of the problems which later railway builders encountered. And George, in making his survey, they.
- [30:27]
Dan Snow
Still are encountering today, we should say.
- [30:29]
Steven Brindle
Encountering all of those problems about negotiating it with all of the local interests, many of whom might be deeply opposed and not at all happy with all these coal wagons coming through the middle of their property. So the problem of negotiating and designing this in detail and then building it would have been a huge one for someone who's primarily a mechanical engineer. But George did it and he got it done, although the cost did rise a long way above what they'd initially expected, as railways generally did.
- [31:00]
Dan Snow
Well, I'm glad to hear that's not an exclusively 21st century problem. So the infrastructure normally challenging. What about the engine itself? Did things move? Did he progress things in terms of the locomotive?
- [31:11]
Steven Brindle
Yes, he did. I mean, it was already 10 years since George had built Blucher. He set up a company, Robert Stephenson and Company, based in Newcastle, Pontine, which he vested in his very brilliant only son, Robert. And Robert Stephenson & Co. Was set up largely to make steam engines, but in particular to make steam locomotives and to make them better than anyone else. And the new company made a new locomotive Locomotion Number one. And there was a specially built passenger coat called the Experiment as well. So George had actually, with some of the money he was making from this, he set up a manufacturing company in Newcastle, Pontine. And Robert Stephenson & Co. Became the leading locomotive manufacturers of the age, and they were certainly technically the best around. He also got the line built in three years. The the track was laid between May 1822 and it opened in September 1825, 25 miles of track from Shildon, which is in the middle of County Tome, the coal mining area running south to Darlington, then along the Tees Valley to Stockton, which is the town at the point where the Tees becomes navigated. And there were several branches leading to coal mines.
- [32:27]
Dan Snow
And tell me about the great day itself when finally in September 1825 when locomotion puffed down the track on 27th.
- [32:37]
Steven Brindle
Of September 1825, George had taken locomotion number one and the experiment to Shildon and his older brother James was driving the engine. I mean he'd given the Pease family a sort of trial drive along it, I think the day before. And on the great day, about 12 wagon loads of coal were ready at colliery. And on the first part of the journey and the branches to collieries, the wagon was still being hauled by stationary engines and ropes in the way you've described to Shildon. So the locomotion actually started at Shildon and it pulled 21 wagons in all, some with coal and some have been fitted with seats. There was supposed to be space for 300 passengers, but actually there were over 400 on the train. And they traveled to Darlington where a crowd of 10,000 people were waiting to welcome it. And more wagons with the Yarm town band were attached and more wagons of coal. And from there the locomotion called an extended train of no less than 31 wagons to Stockton to a temporary station outside the town. And then there was a huge celebratory dinner. So it was quite a day but. But 31 wagons and something like 500 people on board. I think George had really proved what locomotion could do. I mean, I wonder if he knew that it could pull that much.
- [33:58]
Dan Snow
That's the date we've chosen to be the 200th anniversary of STEAM. It changed the world in almost every conceivable way. But what is it about this journey? Is it the length of the journey? Is it the fact that it's a passenger carrying train? Now, what is it about this that makes it the big moment?
- [34:16]
Steven Brindle
It puts so many different things together, Dan. It put so many things which had been brewing in Georgian England together and it showed that something completely new could actually work and be economic. If you think about 20,000 miles of turnpike roads being adopted and upgraded with a 1 1/2 million pounds in revenue on tolls, competitive coach services, mail coach services increasingly fast in capacity, were running over. So this whole model for Competitive passenger transport, 4,000 miles of canal had been built and improving the roads and building the canals had enormously improved surveying skills to make that and it encouraged the formation of large contracting companies to do it. And the model of the, the limited company, the joint Stock company had been developed. And then there was the model of the colliery tramways and so the steam locomotive was really the last piece in an enormously complex jigsaw, social, economic, technical and financial. And every piece of that jigsaw was needed. And Stockton Darlington is the place at which all of this came together. And so it's not a single invention, it's the coming together of lots of things which had been happening in Georgian England and which were on the verge of working. And at last George Stephenson made it work for the Stockton and Darlington Railway. And people went, wow, that will really work. We can put our money in and we won't lose it. And people are already sitting up and taking notice elsewhere.
- [35:59]
Dan Snow
They put their money in. They made a lot of money within a couple of years, didn't they? And that in turn means you can dig new mines because you can actually get that coal to market. You can take vast amounts of coal, the efficiencies, the volume. And as I remember, Stockton either silted up or the quay was too small, wasn't it? And they extend that line to Middlesbrough, which is today. And so in a way that becomes the new terminus, which is why Middlesbrough exists today.
- [36:25]
Steven Brindle
So that is exactly why Middlesbrough exists today. As a result of the extension of the Stockton and Darlington Railway. As you say, it went from being a few houses to having 2,000 inhabitants a year later by about 1830. One of the crucial points was that the Pease's did not lose money. If they'd been seen to lose money, that could have been toxic. Edward Pease had had to put up a ton of money to make this happen because it had cost about 167,000 pounds to build, but they didn't. And it generated money so reliably and fast that they had to extend the railway itself because the stage at Topton actually weren't big enough for the volume of coal that they were bringing and that they were able, they could afford to extend it to Middletown in a very few years.
- [37:08]
Dan Snow
And I guess just to sum up why it matters, it's the smashing. It's the breaking out of the restrictions placed upon us by physics, by time, by space. You can now move unimaginable volumes and weights of material across challenging landscapes at regular, predictable and quite high speeds. I mean, this is the birth of the modern world, a world of communication revolution, where we assume it's the most natural thing in the world, that we can eat produce from around the world at any time of year, where we can move things reliably from one place to another, where we can, gosh, everything, everything. It's a founding Moment.
- [37:46]
Steven Brindle
It's all that, Dan. Railways, I think, more than any other invention, released mankind from the Malthusian trap of population always exceeding or threatening to exceed resources which had restricted population rise and initiating long rise in human life expectancy and living standards and economic growth of modern times.
- [38:06]
Dan Snow
And we should mention the massive acceleration of the release of those byproducts that you get from burning fossil fuels coming out the chimney of locomotion number one. Although we couldn't see it at the time, we realise those gases that would change the composition of our atmosphere, we.
- [38:22]
Steven Brindle
Know that now and they didn't know it then, but of course we would not have the scientific and technological society to have anything like that kind of knowledge if the Industrial Revolution hadn't happened in the first place. This is the ultimate chicken and egg issue, I think, Dan, without the Industrial Revolution, we would never have the scientific understanding to understand our atmosphere and what's happening to it. Anyway, at least we now know and we can take action to reduce carbon emissions. We stand on the shoulder of giants, Dan, and we have a deep debt of gratitude to them.
- [38:54]
Dan Snow
I think extraordinary father and son, George, and then, as you mentioned, Robert would take an increasing role and we may cover that. We look at the next anniversaries of the building of the Liverpool Manchester railway. Thank you very much for coming on, Dan.
- [39:07]
Steven Brindle
A pleasure as always. Thank you very much.
- [39:14]
Dan Snow
Well, thank you so much to Stephen for coming back on the podcast. If you enjoyed this episode, why don't you leave us a review wherever you get your pods? And if you want more on the history of trains, which I know you do, you can check out my history hit documentary Steam, in which I rode on the replica Locomotion. A wonderful thing to sign up to watch it, just click the link in the show notes. See you next time.
- [39:42]
Steven Brindle
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