In 1829 the directors of the new Liverpool and Manchester Railway could not decide whether trains should be hauled by locomotives or dragged by ropes from stationary engine houses every mile or two. To settle it they staged the Rainhill Trials with a 500 pound prize and strict rules: a four-wheeled engine could weigh no more than four and a half tons and had to haul three times its weight at an average of at least 10 miles per hour. George Stephenson was busy building the line, so his son Robert, back from three years managing South American silver mines, built Rocket in Newcastle, and railway treasurer Henry Booth suggested its multi-tube boiler. The 0-2-2 single driver weighed about four and a quarter tons, with over half its weight on the driving wheels, a blast pipe to draw the fire and smokeless coke for fuel.
Shipped in pieces by wagon, barge and coastal steamer, Rocket averaged 14 miles per hour over the 70-mile test and touched about 30, while Novelty and Sans Pareil broke down. At the line’s opening in September 1830 it struck and killed MP William Huskisson. Within months heavier designs such as the Planet class made it obsolete, its cylinders were lowered from 38 degrees and it was sent to haul minerals. In 1834 Lord Dundonald fitted it with experimental rotary engines that leaked steam and could not pull empty carriages.
- Rocket’s boiler had 25 copper fire tubes instead of the single flue of earlier engines.
- Assistant engineer Joseph Locke was driving Rocket when Huskisson stepped onto the track to speak to the Duke of Wellington.
- The engine was later sold for 300 pounds and stripped of its copper and rear wheels in a railway yard.
- Its remains went to the Patent Office Museum in London in 1862.
- Buster Keaton commissioned a working replica for his 1923 film Our Hospitality.
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