Rainhill Level, Liverpool and Manchester Railway

A railway that nearly ran on ropes

In 1829, with the Liverpool and Manchester Railway nearly built, its directors had still not settled how to move the trains. They had first intended to use stationary steam engines hauling carriages on cables. George Stephenson argued for locomotives, and the directors put the question to a public trial with a £500 prize.

It was held at Rainhill from 6 to 14 October. The judges were John Urpeth Rastrick, a locomotive engineer from Stourbridge, Nicholas Wood, a mining engineer from Killingworth, and John Kennedy, a Manchester cotton spinner. Each engine had to haul three times its own weight, and between 10,000 and 15,000 people came to watch, with bands playing.

A horse on a belt and three steam rivals

Ten engines were entered and five ran. Cycloped, driven by a horse walking on a belt, withdrew after the horse burst through the floor. Timothy Burstall's Perseverance had been damaged on the way and retired. Timothy Hackworth's Sans Pareil was 300 pounds over the weight limit and nearly completed the trials. Novelty, built by John Braithwaite and John Ericsson, was lighter and faster than any of them, and the crowd favourite.

Robert Stephenson's Rocket did the work on the third day, Thursday 8 October. The Times reported that the engine weighed 4 tons 5 hundredweight with its water and hauled about 13 tons. It covered 70 miles in two halves of ten return journeys each, with a pause for water between, averaging over 11 and then over 12 miles an hour including stops. It burned no more than half a ton of coke, and at its fastest reached about 30 miles an hour.

The famous colours are only half documented

Rocket was the only engine to meet all the conditions, and the £500 was shared between the Stephensons and Henry Booth, the railway's treasurer, who may have suggested its boiler. Twenty-five copper fire tubes carried hot gas through the water, a blastpipe drew the fire, and two cylinders set at an angle drove the large wooden front wheels directly.

What it looked like is less settled. Accounts agree on yellow and black, the colours of the fastest road coaches of the day, but the white chimney of today's replicas is less securely documented, and the surviving engine, rebuilt with near-horizontal cylinders, no longer looks as it did at Rainhill.

Why Britain keeps Rocket as a relic

The Liverpool and Manchester Railway opened on 15 September 1830, worked by locomotives. The day was marred when William Huskisson, MP for Liverpool, was struck and killed by Rocket at Parkside.

For Britons Rocket is the emblem of the Industrial Revolution and of the railway age the country gave the world. It was given to the Patent Office Museum, now the Science Museum, in 1862 and shown in London for 150 years. Since 2019 it has been at the National Railway Museum in York, apart from a spell at Locomotion in Shildon from 2023 to 2025.

When replicas restaged the contest in 2002, neither Sans Pareil nor Novelty completed the course.

Sources

• Wikipedia (en): Rainhill trials
• Wikipedia (en): Stephenson's Rocket
• steamlocomotives.org