Liverpool and Manchester Railway

Assembled from 37 blocks · 1 evidence · 47 related

1. Story
2. Opened on 15 September 1830 between the port that landed the raw cotton and the city that spun it, and the first railway anywhere to be worked entirely by steam locomotives, to carry passengers and goods to a timetable as its ordinary business, and to run in both directions on a double track under signal control. It exists because the canal companies between the two cities had become a monopoly charging what they liked; the railway was a shippers' revolt as much as a technical project. Its engineering was severe — the crossing of Chat Moss, a peat bog, was achieved by floating the line on brushwood and heather — and its choice of traction was settled competitively at the Rainhill trials in 1829, won by Robert Stephenson's Rocket. The opening day also produced the first widely reported railway death of a public figure, the MP William Huskisson, struck by a locomotive at Parkside while the ceremonial trains were halted, which put both the promise and the danger of the technology into every newspaper in the country on the same morning.
3. Knowledge
4. The British railway network
5. Liverpool and Manchester Railway
6. Manchester
7. The main-line steam locomotive
8. Connections
9. Manchester
10. The British railway network
11. The main-line steam locomotive
12. The Rainhill trials settle the question of traction
13. The Liverpool and Manchester Railway opens
14. The Bridgewater Canal
15. Liverpool and Manchester Railway
16. The steam engine
17. Nineteenth-century British urbanisation
18. Birmingham
19. The Bridgewater Canal opens from Worsley into Manchester
20. The Liverpool and Manchester Railway opens
21. Chadwick reports on the sanitary condition of the labouring population
22. The census records an urban majority
23. Puddling and rolling
24. The British canal network
25. Liverpool and Manchester Railway
26. The Stockton and Darlington Railway opens
27. The Rainhill trials settle the question of traction
28. The Great Exhibition
29. Liverpool and Manchester Railway
30. The Rainhill trials settle the question of traction
31. Trans-Siberian Railway
32. Ruling gradient
33. Coal
34. The through sleeping car
35. Electrification of the Trans-Siberian is completed
36. Evidence
37. Supports the identity, builder and date of the locomotive that won the Rainhill trials, and by extension the decision of the Liverpool and Manchester Railway to adopt locomotive rather than cable haulage. V55 verification basis: NOT consulted; the collection record was not opened in this session and the surviving object's current display location is not asserted here.