The Rainhill trials settle the question of traction
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The Liverpool and Manchester Railway's directors had not decided whether to work the line with locomotives or with stationary engines hauling on cables, and ran a public competition on a level stretch at Rainhill to find out. Robert Stephenson's Rocket, with a multi-tubular boiler and a blastpipe sharpening the draught, completed the trials and won. The decision to buy locomotives rather than cable haulage shaped every railway built afterwards.
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Connections · 3
- Liverpool and Manchester Railwayconcerns
- The British railway networkconcerns
- The main-line steam locomotiveconcerns
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