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After an accident at a level crossing, the bosses of the Leicester and Swannington Railway acknowledged that drivers needed more than lung power.
Engineer George Stephenson was the principal shareholder in the Leicester and Swannington Railway, which opened in June 1832, not yet seven years after Stephenson’s historic Stockton and Darlington line carried the public for the first time. The L&SR had been running for just under a year when there was an accident at a level crossing, and Mr Ashlen Bagster, manager of the line, had a brainwave.
The more that pioneering engineer George Stephenson understood of the world around him, the more his sense of wonder grew.
Many Victorian scientists rebelled against the Church, at that time dominated by a colourless Calvinism that stifled wonder and mistrusted enthusiasm. But in private, many retained a powerful sense of the reality of God through wondering at his creation, as railway pioneer George Stephenson did.
George Stephenson was only too pleased to save the Government from its scientific advisers.
When a line from London to Newcastle was first planned in the 1840s, Brunel recommended an atmospheric railway, which pulls carriages along with vacuum tubes laid between the rails instead of locomotives. The decision lay with the Government’s chief engineer, Robert Stephenson, but his father George made sure the idea got no further than Robert’s outer office.
George Stephenson won the admiration of French navvies by showing them how a Geordie works a shovel.
George Stephenson was arguably history’s most influential engineer, yet he never really gave up being a Northumberland miner. He always retained his Geordie ordinariness, and was never happier than when he was among his fellow working men.
George Stephenson argued that his steam engines were solar-powered.
Today’s enthusiasts for ‘renewable energy’ have brought Britain’s once-mighty coal industry to an end. Yet judging by George Stephenson’s exchange with William Buckland, the eccentric but brilliant Oxford geologist, there may have been a serious misunderstanding...
A young George Stephenson takes responsibility for the team spirit at Black Callerton mine.
In 1801, the job of brakesman at Black Callerton pit was given to a young George Stephenson. It was a very responsible job, as it involved lowering and raising miners in the deep and dangerous mineshaft, but Stephenson felt he had a wider duty to the whole mine.