Robert Stephenson Trust and the North Eastern Railway Association

ROBERT STEPHENSON: RAILWAY ENGINEER John Addyman and Victoria Haworth

At the time of his death Robert Stephenson was considered a far greater engineer than his father, George, or any of his contemporaries.  His outstanding accomplishments demanded that he should be buried in Westminster Abbey.

Over the last 150 years his reputation has suffered by much of his credit being ignored or transferred to his father, George Stephenson.  Samuel Smiles in writing his 'Lives of the Engineers' is guilty of starting the erosion of Robert's image.  How many hundreds of books have followed Smiles and credited the design and building of 'Rocket' to George Stephenson rather than to Robert?  Robert was entirely responsible for it - George was far too busy building the Liverpool and Manchester Railway at the time.

This book describes Robert Stephenson's main achievements and his significant influence in the design and building of locomotives and railways for Britain and other countries.  His influence on the development of the locomotive from the crude products of the second decade of the nineteenth century to the capable machines of the 1840s is fully covered in Chapter 3.  The difficult and unprecedented bridges over the Tyne, Menai, Nile and St.Lawrence are described in Chapters 5 to 8.

		Contents
	Chapter 1.	Early Life: from Killingworth to Colombia.
	Chapter 2.	Return Home: small early railways including the Stanhope & Tyne.
	Chapter 3.	Locomotive Development: 1803-1846.
	Chapter 4.	London to Birmingham but not to Brighton
	Chapter 5.	Main Lines to the North and Disputes: Birmingham to Berwick
	Chapter 6.	The Chester and Holyhead Railway: the tubular bridges.
	Chapter 7.	Work Overseas in the 1850s: Switzerland, Egypt and Canada
	Chapter 8.	Other details of his life after 1833.

This 176 page A4 size publication is printed on gloss art paper throughout with a casebound colour cover.  There are in the order of 110 monochrome photographs and line drawings together with 4 pages of colour illustrations.

ISBN 1-873513-60-7.  The book will be on sale at our open days.  (Friends of the Trust can obtain a copy of this book from South Street at a reduced price.)