COULD Robert Stephenson have been a junkie, a dope addict? We don't know, and a new book sheds no light on a question which has just been tossed into the historical arena on the 200th anniversary of the great man's birth.

While Stephenson Power, published by Newcastle City Council, concentrates on the engineering achievements of Robert and his father, George, the National Railway Museum at York hopes to learn more about the last months of Robert's life by having a lock of his hair analysed.

Robert died only four days short of his 56th birthday, having burned himself out as he helped to drive the industrial revolution, and experts hope that his hair sample will reveal more about his daily life, his diet, his health and what may have contributed to his death.

The young Robert had a fine head of hair judging from contemporary pictures in Stephenson Power, written by Ken Smith and claimed to be the first accessible illustrated joint biography of father and son in recent years.

It's a slim book at only 40 pages, but it neatly summarises the Stephensons' lasting place in history for achievements which encompassed bridges, locomotives, railway networks and safer working conditions for coal miners.

George was the colliery worker's son who, despite a perfunctory education, rose from obscurity to wealth and fame in a manner which many would still recognise today. Ken Smith describes him as confident, assertive and ambitious, with great engineering talents, but he also enjoyed good luck and was in the right place at the right time.

He did not achieve basic literacy skills until he began attending night classes as an 18-year-old, but his rise from colliery brakesman to enginewright earning £100 a year was astonishing by any standards.

He built his first "travelling engine" in 1814 for a wagonway at Killingworth, having undoubtedly learned from earlier pioneers like Chapman, Buddle and Hedley, and immersed himself in the development of iron instead of wooden rails.

His planning and building of the 1825 Stockton and Darlington Railway, with locomotives produced at a Newcastle works managed by his 20-year-old son, and his completion of the Liverpool and Manchester Railway against daunting odds often overshadow his development of a miner's safety lamp - the "Geordie lamp" - in a head-to-head competition with Humphry Davy.

George could afford to send his only son first to an elementary school and then to an academy in Newcastle. Ken Smith notes how close their relationship was: "As Robert learned, so George learned. The father began hearing of scientific and other subjects from his son and was eager to acquire knowledge of them. They studied together, helping each other."

Robert is best known for building the Rocket, winner of the 1829 Rainhill trials and nemesis of MP William Huskisson in a fatal accident on the Liverpool and Manchester a year later, but his civil engineering output was prodigious. If you seek his monuments, look around you. They include the double-deck High Level Bridge at Newcastle, the Royal Border Bridge at Berwick and the tubular Britannia Bridge over the Menai Straits to Anglesey.

Locomotion No 1, now in North Road Museum, is not the only Darlington connection with the Stephensons, but the other link is often overlooked and indeed is no more.

The Forth Street works in Newcastle, opened in 1823 as the world's first locomotive factory and run by Robert Stephenson and Company, found itself so busy that new premises had to be built at Springfield, Darlington, in 1901. Most of the Newcastle factory was sold to the neighbouring engineering company Hawthorn Leslie.

In 1937, a merger with the engineering department of Hawthorn Leslie created Robert Stephenson and Hawthorns, a name to be found on the identifying works plates fixed to countless locomotives built at Darlington.

The Darlington branch of Stivvies, as it became known, concentrated mainly on larger engines and survived into the diesel age, its clients including some of the powerful 100mph Deltics which needed early teething problems ironed out.

These days, though, you will look in vain for Stivvies just off Thompson Street East before you go over the hump-backed railway bridge. The landmark chimney has gone and the A to Z map suggests that much of the area has been redeveloped with houses and roads named not after North-East railway heritage but after American states.

In a final personal chapter, Ken Smith assesses George Stephenson as a man of kindliness and generosity despite his ambitious nature, but his personal life was marked by tragedy. Two wives died and his third marriage lasted only six months. He died in 1848, a rich man living in a Chesterfield mansion, after contracting pleurisy.

Mr Smith says: "Robert comes across to us as a quieter, more thoughtful character, both polite and cultured. He was well liked by most of those who knew him, being charitable and patient in nature."

Robert suffered a blow when his wife died from cancer in 1842 without bearing children. He never remarried. In 1847, he was elected MP for Whitby and became president of the Institution of Civil Engineers eight years later, but Mr Smith says personal happiness eluded him in the last years of his life.

Robert drove himself hard and, far from unearthing skeletons in cupboards, the National Railway Museum investigation of Robert's hair may amplify a suggestion by Samuel Smiles in his 1862 book on the Stephensons. He said of Robert: "He was habitually careless with his health and perhaps he indulged in narcotics to a prejudicial extent, hence he often became 'hipped' and sometimes ill."

The lock of hair, believed to have been taken at the time of Robert's death, has been on display at the NRM since 1982. Bioarchaeologists and forensic experts at Bradford University will undertake extensive tests to try to discover details of Robert's diet, health and environment. They hope to collaborate with experts in the field of drug analysis in hair.

Chemical analysis will involve techniques similar to those used at archaeological sites on mummies from ancient Egypt and South America and associated with the discovery of arsenic in the hair of Napoleon Bonaparte.

Helen Ashby, head of knowledge and collections at the NRM, says: "We hope this new study will provide a much more detailed and intimate picture of the man behind the genius.

"Much like his hard-working contemporaries, including Brunel, Robert died at an early age and is known to have suffered from what we now call burn-out or executive stress.

"Historical commentators also remark on his reliance on stimulants and narcotics to escape the pressures of his busy commercial and political life. If this project does reveal that this may be true it would indicate that some aspects of our society have changed very little in the last 150 years - that the price of fame and fortune could be just as high then as it sometimes is today."

Prof Howell Edwards, director of research and professor of molecular spectroscopy at Bradford University, says: "Preliminary results show that this hair sample is quite exceptional in quality and should reveal some interesting results, although it is too soon to predict accurately what they will be.

"This sample is at least 144 years old, which may mean that some information has been eroded by time, but the prospect of using cutting edge technology to help scholars learn more about one of the founding fathers of the industrial revolution is very exciting."

* Stephenson Power, by Ken Smith (Tyne Bridge Publishing, £4.99), available from Newcastle Libraries, bookshops or the publishers (£1 postage extra) at City Library, Princess Square, Newcastle on Tyne NE99 1DX.