The opening of the Liverpool & Manchester Railway is rightly considered a milestone in world history, but in truth the opening day itself was a disaster.
- It started by shooting a man in the face with a cannon
- It was the scene of protests which led the Prime Minister to flee a city (no less a man than the "Iron" Duke of Wellington, at that!)
- It killed one of its greatest supporters with a machine it was trying to convince the public was safe
The final episode in our mini-series on the L&MR explores the formal opening of the world’s first modern railway on the 15th September 1830, and the first few locomotives to operate on the line.
Chapter notes:
00:00 Start
02:00 Last episode’s trivia answer
02:42 A crowd gathers at Edge Hill
04:00 The locomotives: Arrow, Comet, Dart, Meteor, Northumbrian, North Star, Phoenix and Rocket
05:15 The inaugural trains and the great and the good
06:25 The Duke of Wellington’s coach
08:27 Northumbrian’s tender
09:10 The first (official) railway journey
12:12 William Huskisson
13:52 Parkside Station
16:25 The Rocket locomotive hits Huskisson
18:00 Navvy killed on the L&MR a year earlier in the same way
18:55 Back on the line
21:47 Antagonistic crowd come to see Old Nosey (or, Michael gets distracted by a potted history of British revolutions that nearly happened)
23:50 Peterloo, Power-loom riots, Voting reform and Charles X
25:25 The Iron Duke leaves Manchester… then the railway… then office
27:50 Early locos
28:15 Braithwaite & Ericsson’s William the Fourth and Queen Adelaide locomotives
29:58 Robert Stephensons’ Rocket class locomotives
33:15 Introduction of the Planet locomotive class
37:00 Conclusion
39:03 Trivia question
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