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Updated: June 7, 2025
Blackett, of Wylam, which are all the more worthy of notice, as the persevering efforts of this gentleman in a great measure paved the way for the labours of George Stephenson, who, shortly after, took up the question of steam locomotion, and brought it to a successful issue. The Wylam waggon-way is one of the oldest in the north of England.
The pit opened at Newburn, at which old Robert Stephenson worked, proving a failure, it was closed; and a new pit was sunk at Water-row, on a strip of land lying between the Wylam waggon-way and the river Tyne, about half a mile west of Newburn Church.
Blackett, who owned Wylam Colliery at the beginning of the nineteenth century, took the keenest interest in the question of locomotives, and had tried more than one on his estate before George Stephenson brought them to the point of practical use.
Professional growers of orchids are fond of speculating how much the Wylam collection would realize if judiciously put on the market. I shall not mention the estimates I have heard; it is enough to say they reach many, many thousands of pounds; that the difference between the highest and the lowest represents a handsome fortune.
Down to the year 1807 it was formed of wooden spars or rails, laid down between the colliery at Wylam—where old Robert Stephenson had worked—and the village of Lemington, some four miles down the Tyne, where the coals were loaded into keels or barges, and floated down past Newcastle, to be shipped for London. Each chaldron-waggon had a man in charge of it, and was originally drawn by one horse.
It is indeed wonderful to think how very different is the England in which we live to-day, from that in which we might possibly have been living were it not for the barefooted little collier boy who made clay models of engines at Wylam, and who grew at last into the great and famous engineer of the marvellous Liverpool and Manchester railway.
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