Born in the age of coal, the rail industry helped ignite the climate crisis. Today, rail — celebrating its 200-year anniversary — is reinventing itself as the greenest mode of mass transport.
Two hundred years ago tomorrow, on 27 September 1825, Locomotion No. 1 pulled passengers in a carriage, starting modern rail travel. And, as coal-powered locomotives played a key part in the industrial revolution, it can be argued that rail travel also played a pivotal role in starting the climate crisis.
“Yes, the climate crisis was partly caused by railways,” agrees Rob Scargill, lead curator of Railway Futures: the Porterbrook Gallery at the National Railway Museum in York, «but the climate crisis could, in part, be alleviated by railways,” he added.
“It’s a legal obligation that by 2050 we have to decarbonize the whole economy. And transport is the biggest emitting sector. Nearly a quarter of all greenhouse gas emissions in the U.K. are transport related. Unlike in the past, rail is the now greenest mode of mass transport, and getting greener. One of the big ways of decarbonizing rail is through electrification powered by renewable sources.”
Scargill was speaking at Locomotion museum in Shildon, County Durham, where tomorrow a replica of Locomotion No. 1, built in 1975, will recreate—over three days—the first journey on the Stockton & Darlington Railway, a coal line which also carried fare-paying passengers. The 26-mile journey between Witton Park Colliery and Stockton via Shildon and Darlington on 27 September 1825 is today celebrated as a history-changing event transforming how the world traded, travelled, and communicated.
The three day reenactment is the focal point of the nine-month S&DR200 festival celebrating the region’s pioneering past, and has incorporated a series of large-scale outdoor events, exhibitions and new art commissions in its public spaces, libraries, and world-class museums.
Today, the newly restored replica of Locomotion No.1 started from the Locomotion museum in Shildon—part of the national Science Museum group—which houses the original locomotive, and which is adjacent to the Stockton & Darlington Railway line, which is still a live line.Tourism
Since soul-crushing job losses in the 1960s through to the 1980s, rural County Durham has been one of the most deprived parts of the country. It’s likely cold comfort to those who lost their jobs, but the area is now evolving into a tourism hotspot, with Locomotion alone predicted to attract 250,000 visitors this year.Locomotion
The first steam engine on the S&DR—known as Locomotion No. 1 for 170 years or so—pulled 27 waggons along this first “Permanent Way” on its opening day in 1825. This linear event was said to have been witnessed by 40,000 or so spectators entertained by a band in the final waggon “playing cheering and appropriate airs.”
The pivotal early locomotive—a travelling steam engine rather than one fixed to the ground—puffed through the Stockton & Darlington Railway’s Georgian landscape. The 26-mile line was mainly used to transport coal to market, but as it also carried fare-paying folk it was an important stepping stone in the development of passenger railways, pre-dating the better-known Liverpool to Machester railway of 1830, which is world famous for the Rocket locomotive and was designed from the get-go to be a city-to-city line. (George Stephenson was involved with both railways, and his Newcastle locomotive factory also supplied the first steam engines that worked them.)
Locomotion Museum houses 47 engines and carriages from the early Stockton and Darlington Railway. Why, in 2004, did the Science Museum group open such an impressive—and free entry—attraction in a small, tucked-away town some 62 miles from the National Rail Museum in York? Because Shildon was the world’s first “railway town,” created from scratch to house a wagon works operational from 1833 through to 1984 when the plant still employed more than 2,500 people.
