Stephenson’s Patent Locomotive 1836

The Steam Locomotive was invented in Great Britain in 1804 by Richard Trevithick. The first practical steam locomotive, the famous Rocket, was built in 1825 by the inventor Robert Stephenson, who’s innovations were used on almost all locomotives through the early 20th century.

The Stephenson’s Patent Locomotive, a 2-2-2 type, was built in 1836 for the London and Birmingham Railway as a “contractor’s locomotive”, used to haul earth excavated when building the railway. She produced 77 horsepower, and was capable of hauling up to 220 tons at 14 miles per hour on level track, and forty tons at 35 miles per hour. Stephenson incorporated many important inventions in this design, including his “Gab valve Gear, illustrated below, hence the name Patent.

My SolidWorks™ CAD model, including every individual component, was reverse-engineered from exceptional line drawings created in 1838 and published, at the request of Queen Victoria, as a treatise defining the State of the Art of locomotive engineering at the time.

It was originally published by Thomas Tredgold as The Steam Engine: It’s Invention and Progressive Improvement, an original of which is in the Archive Collection of Stanford University (USA), and reprinted by Glenwood Publishers in 1967.