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Updated: June 5, 2025
Considerable difficulty was experienced in keeping up the pressure of steam; but when there was pressure enough, Trevithick would call upon the people to “jump up,” so as to create a load upon the engine.
One of the strangers was a tall, gaunt man, shrunken and hollow-looking, shabbily dressed, and apparently poverty-stricken. On making inquiry, he found it was Trevithick, the builder of the first railroad locomotive! He was returning home from the gold-mines of Peru penniless. He had left England in 1816, with powerful steam-engines, intended for the drainage and working of the Peruvian mines.
No further steps were, however, taken by Murdock to embody his idea of a locomotive carriage in a more practical form. The idea was next taken up by Murdock’s pupil, Richard Trevithick, who resolved on building a steam-carriage adapted for common roads as well as railways. He took out a patent to secure the right of his invention in 1802.
Watt himself designed plans for a "steam locomotive," but ere he had perfected his ideas, in the year 1804, a locomotive made by Richard Trevithick carried a load of twenty tons at Pen-y-darran in the Wales mining district.
In England, Trevithick, Blenkinsop, Ericsson, Stephenson, and others; in America, John Stevens, now an old man but persistent in his plans as ever and with able sons to help him, had erected a circular railway at Hoboken as early as 1826, on which he ran a locomotive at the rate of twelve miles an hour.
They had forded rivers and wandered through forests, leaving all their baggage behind them, and had reached thus far with little more than the clothes upon their backs. Almost the only remnant of precious metal saved by Trevithick was a pair of silver spurs, which he took back with him to Cornwall.
One of the most useful modifications in the engine was that devised by Trevithick, and eventually perfected by George Stephenson and his son, in the form of the railway locomotive, by which social changes of immense importance have been brought about, of even greater consequence, considered in their results on human progress and civilization, than the condensing-engine of Watt.
Altogether the Trevithick engine at Crewe is a relic of the very highest interest, and it is most fortunate that it has come into Mr. Webb's hands and has thus been rescued from destruction.
He accordingly obtained from Trevithick, in October, 1804, a plan of his engine, provided with “friction-wheels,” and employed Mr. John Whinfield, of Pipewellgate, Gateshead, to construct it at his foundry there. The engine was constructed under the superintendence of one John Steele, an ingenious mechanic who had been in Wales, and worked under Trevithick in fitting the engine at Pen-y-darran.
On the second day of the performance, crowds flocked to see it; but Trevithick, in one of his odd freaks, shut up the place, and shortly after removed the engine. It is, however, probable that the inventor came to the conclusion that the state of the roads at that time was such as to preclude its coming into general use for purposes of ordinary traffic.
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