George Stephenson was born in 1781, the son of a Northumberland colliery engineman. Within a hundred years of his birth his railway legacy had opened up vast tracts of the planet, many of those routes engineered by George himself or his son Robert. Their locomotive factory at Newcastle upon Tyne soon outgrew its premises and a much larger site was founded at Darlington.
The father and son are well known for their pioneering work on the Stockton & Darlington and Liverpool & Manchester railways, but they engineered more than locomotives. Robert is responsible for some of the worlds most innovative and impressive bridges and the company the Stephensons founded continued (as Robert Stephenson Hawthorn) to build locomotives for a burgeoning worldwide market for well over a century. This book will tell its story and show its global influence.
Colin Alexander has been a railway enthusiast for more than thirty years and volunteered on preserved Deltic locomotives. He was born in Northumberland, and has a life-long passion for local and transport history, sparked by his mothers copy of The Kings England Northumberland. Appreciative of the countys unique place geographically and historically, he has explored most of its once-inhabited hilltops and its mediaeval castles, and walked the length of its greatest defensive monument Hadrians Wall. He lives in Whitley Bay. Alon is a transport history author specialising in railways.
