Rainhill Men: Railway Pioneers

The Rainhill Trials of October 1829 were a defining moment in history, establishing the steam locomotive as the motive-power of the railways for more than a century. Much has been said about Rocket, Novelty, and Sans Pareil, but what of the pioneering engineers who built them? George and Robert Stephenson are well known names in the canon of railway history, Henry Booth (who designed Rocket’s boiler) was the world’s first railway manager and was instrumental in the adoption of Greenwich Mean Time. Timothy Hackworth, the Methodist enginewright from Shildon, established his own engineering firm, which built some of the first locomotives to run in Russia. Although his locomotive Novelty was a failure, John Ericsson found fame as the designer of the USS Monitor. This book seeks to explore the social history of the Rainhill Trials: who these engineers were and the times they lived and worked in.