ABSTRACT
The emergence of the steam railway in the first quarter of the nineteenth century was a phenomenon of extraordinary importance, not only in the development of industrialization worldwide but as one of the key new technologies without which much of nineteenth-century civilization as we came to know it could not have come about. From primeval origins to a fully fledged form of transport took less than 25 years: from, say, 1802 and Richard Trevithick’s early experiments in Coalbrookdale and later Penydarren to the opening of the Stockton and Darlington Railway in 1825. In less than another 20 years the era of the railway was with us, and the new technologies and the systems that supported them were being adopted in countries throughout Europe and in North America.
