Opening of the Stockton and Darlington Railway
- Date
- 27 September 1825
- Category
- Science, technology & invention
- Region
- United Kingdom (County Durham, north-east England)
- Era
- Modern
- Significance
On 27 September 1825 the Stockton and Darlington Railway in County Durham opened as the world's first public railway to use steam locomotives. On opening day George Stephenson's locomotive 'Locomotion No.
1' hauled a train of coal wagons, a passenger coach and some 600 people from Shildon to Stockton before enormous crowds. Conceived chiefly to move coal cheaply from inland collieries to navigable water at Stockton, the line demonstrated that steam haulage on iron rails could carry freight, and people, faster and more cheaply than horses or canals. Although passengers were at first drawn by horses until locomotive-hauled carriages were introduced in 1833, the railway proved the commercial viability of the new technology and triggered a wave of railway projects in Britain and abroad. It is conventionally treated as the birth of the modern railway age, a transport revolution that would reshape industry, trade, settlement and warfare across the nineteenth-century world.
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Empires active in 27 September 1825
- Russian Empire1721 CE – 1917 CE
- British Empire1583 CE – 1997 CE
- Qing Dynasty1636 CE – 1912 CE
- Spanish Empire1492 CE – 1976 CE
- Portuguese Empire1415 CE – 1999 CE
- Mughal Empire1526 CE – 1857 CE
Related science, technology & invention events
- Faraday discovers electromagnetic induction29 August 1831
- Dalton publishes his atomic theory1808
- Third Plague Pandemic begins in Yunnan1855 (origin in Yunnan); global spread from 1894
- Darwin publishes On the Origin of Species24 November 1859
- Maxwell formulates the theory of electromagnetism1865–1873
- Opening of the Suez Canal17 November 1869
Further reading
The wider story
A Little History of Science
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