The day history woke and took notice of a man called Timothy

Old Shildon was a mainly agricultural settlement, secondary in importance to its neighbours of Middridge and Heighington.

Even by 1821, 1,000 years after that first mention, it was still only a footnote, its population still only 115 people, who lived largely on the corner where Auckland Terrace meets Main Street and Byerley Road.

Then something happened; history woke and took notice. The 1831 census records a population explosion to 867 people, and by the time the counters returned in 1841, 2,631 people were living there.

That something can be traced directly to the hill of refuge from which the town takes its name. The hill is part of a ridge 100 metres high; behind the ridge is the Durham coalfield, in front of it is the flat Durham coastal plain.

Locomotives run easily across the plain, pulling wagonloads of coal to the sea, where it can be sailed down to lucrative London markets. But locomotives struggle with hills.

This presented a problem to the pioneers of the Stockton and Darlington Railway (S&DR). They needed to penetrate the hill to reach the coal for their new-fangled steam-powered locomotives to haul across the flat.

So the pioneers compromised. They built stationary engines on the summit of the ridge. These engines turned a rope, which hauled the wagons of coal up the ridge from the coalfield and then lowered them gently down the other side to the coastal plain.

There, at the foot of the ridge, stood a steam locomotive, quietly smoking away, waiting to drag the coal across the plain to the sea.

Where the plain met the ridge - at the end of the locomotives' line - the pioneers decided they needed a workshop, somewhere to repair the locos after their journey and somewhere near enough to look after the stationary engines on the summits.

Yet, in the shadow of Old Shildon, was only "a wet swampy field" according to John Dixon, one of the surveyors of the S&DR. "A likely place to find a snipe or a flock of peewits."

Another old-timer was even more dismissive. "It was a damp, dreary and unpromising site," he said, "wanting any attributes to make it a desirable centre of work."

The pioneers, though, were convinced. This was where they would establish their New Shildon workshop - which today is the site of the Locomotion museum.

Now they needed a man of mechanics, ingenuity and great skill to take control of this most distant outpost of their empire.

Fortunately, George Stephenson, "the father of the locomotive" and the chief surveyor of the S&DR, knew of such a man. He was four-and-a-half years his junior, born in the same Northumberland village of Wylam. He had gone to the village school and then to Wylam pit as an apprentice blacksmith - Stephenson himself had found work at the nearby Killingworth colliery.

This chap's father, John, had been foreman blacksmith at Wylam and had died in 1804, and as soon as the boy was old enough, he had inherited his father's responsible job.

This was at a time when Wylam, under Christopher Blackett, was experimenting with home-made engines, curious contraptions that screeched loudly as the steam entered the chimney. The foreman blacksmith was heavily involved in these experiments.

In 1815, as this chap completed his movement from his father's Anglicanism to his own Methodism, he had refused to work on Sundays. Even though he was highly regarded, Wylam let him go, and he got a job at Walbottle colliery.

There, in terms of locomotive building, he stagnated.

Stephenson, though, soared, building locos (although not making much technical progress with them), manufacturing a reputation and, in 1822, getting himself mixed up with Edward Pease, of Darlington, who was building the Stockton and Darlington Railway.

Indeed, such was Stephenson's reputation that he was also involved in the building of the Liverpool and Manchester Railway and, in 1824, was invited to survey for gold and silver mines in Venezuela and the Caribbean.

Stephenson dredged his mind for a suitable candidate for such an adventure, and recalled the chap from Wylam now working at Walbottle.

However, the chap - 38, and with a large family - turned down the offer of four years in South America. Eventually, Stephenson sent his son, Robert, even though he was barely 20.

But this left a vacancy at Robert Stephenson and Company, locomotive builders of Forth Street, Newcastle. The factory had been financed by the Peases, and they were getting impatient for some engines to run on their new line.

Stephenson again turned to the chap at Walbottle, and he agreed to work temporarily at Forth Street.

Indeed, this fellow did such a good job that when the S&DR was looking for someone to take charge of the New Shildon outpost, Stephenson had no hesitation in recommending him.

And so, in March 1825, after a meeting at the King's Head Hotel in Darlington, Timothy Hackworth - of course - became the S&DR's resident engineer, the superintendent of permanent and locomotive engines.

He started on £150-a-year, with the company providing a house and all the coal he needed for his fire.

That house, newly built when Hackworth moved into it in May 1826, is now part of the new museum.

But when Hackworth moved in, the S&DR was in the grip of a crisis. It had opened on September 27, 1825 - the first train starting its journey at New Shildon, at the foot of the ridge, in front of the Masons Arms pub.

Although Locomotion No 1 had reached 15mph that day, it, and the three other engines on the line, were desperately unreliable.

Take, for example, 1828. In March, locomotive number two - named Hope - blew up at Simpasture, to the north of Aycliffe, blowing its driver John Gillespie 24 yards and scalding him so badly that he died of his injuries (probably the first fatality on a publicly-owned passenger railway).

Four months later, Locomotion No 1 exploded at Heighington station, killing its driver John Cree and maiming waterpumper Edward Turnbull so that his "face was black and speckled like a Dalmatian dog ever after".

So unreliable were the exploding engines that the railway pioneers were considering giving up on steam and going back to horsepower.

But, in 1827, Hackworth set about building a locomotive "that shall answer your purpose". In the freezing sheds of New Shildon - so cold that the molten wax froze as it rolled down the side of his candle - he worked on locomotive number five, Royal George.

It was a heavy thing (12 tons compared with Stephenson's eight-tonners), with six wheels as opposed to the normal four.

It featured a spring safety valve, so it would not explode, and a blast pipe that injected the exhaust steam back into the chimney to keep combustion going smoothly and so boiler pressure even.

It rolled out of the New Shildon shed in November 1827 and set to work. It was slow - 4mph - but reliable. In 1828, with Stephenson's creations exploding all around it, it pulled 22,422 tons of coals 20 miles at a cost of £446. A year's worth of horses would have cost £998. And it didn't break down or kill anyone.

The S&DR was so happy that it awarded Hackworth a £20 bonus. It ordered that horsedrawn vehicles be removed from the line, and it ordered a new engine from Hackworth to be called Victory. Steampower had triumphed, and Hackworth was the architect of that triumph.

Hackworth's 1829 engine, Sans Pareil - which stands in pride of place at the entrance to the new museum - might not have triumphed at the Rainhill Trials, beaten by Stephenson's Rocket and, it is alleged, by Stephenson's underhand tactics. But his 1830 engine Globe whizzed along the S&DR at 50mph.

During the 1830s, Hackworth became semi-detached from the S&DR so he could build locos for other people.

In 1836, his 16-year-old son, John Wesley Hackworth, took the first locomotive to Russia, a £1,884 monster that young John steamed up in front of Tsar Nicholas at the Imperial Summer Palace at Tsarkoye-Selo. In 1838, New Shildon built three locos for Canada, each of them despatched with a New Shildon driver.

In 1840, Hackworth went wholly on his own, calling his sheds the Soho Works, after a suggestion by Joseph Pease (Soho was the name of the steam-pioneering Boulton and Watt works in Birmingham in 1760 and of the first static steam engine works in the US in 1800).

Around the Soho Works grew the tight terraces in which the expanding population lived.

Hackworth was the father of New Shildon, building a chapel (1831), a railway institute (1833) and a school (1841). He preached all over the district, and on more than one occasion appeared at a pavement auction, bought up the possessions of a distressed family and handed them back.

Being such a staunch Methodist might suggest a man - a 6ft-one at that - of no fun, but in his youth, Timothy was a dancer and a snuff-taker. He encouraged his six daughters to go horseriding, and he played his grand piano - the only one in New Shildon - until his end.

In 1849, he built his last engine, Sans Pareil No 2, which was the culmination of everything he had learned. It ran on the North Eastern Railway at more than 80mph - an extraordinary advance considering that 25 years earlier, the railway began at a stately 15mph with its detractors predicting that if it took human beings at 30mph, their eyeballs would explode.

Timothy Hackworth died the following year, aged 64. His Soho Works were bought by the S&DR which, a decade later, decided that locomotive-building should be concentrated in the new North Road Shops in Darlington.

As a result, Darlington took all the kudos, with New Shildon a wagon-building satellite. But it was still the world's first railway town, the cradle of the railways, where it all began...

Published: ??/??/2004

Echo Memories, The Northern Echo, Priestgate, Darlington DL1 1NF, e-mail chris.lloyd@nne.co.uk or telephone (01325) 505062.