Usines de locomotives - Grande Bretagne : livres (3/3)

This concise look at the locomotive company Robert Stephenson & Co from 1823 to 1923 by J. G. Warren provides a unique history of the locomotive industry as it came to be built.
He includes details such as letters, diagrams, photos, pictures and tables to give a full understanding of that century of progression.

They carried Britain into the modern age with dramatic speed, transforming the pace and style of everyday life. We owe them to two men who, father and son, can lay claim to be the most important engineers of their time, George and Robert Stephenson.

In this excellent biography L. T. C. Rolt, author of Brunel and Thomas Telford, assesses their life and their work.

George Stephenson was born in 1781, the son of a Northumberland colliery engineman. Within a hundred years of his birth his railway legacy had opened up vast tracts of the planet, many of those routes engineered by George himself or his son Robert.
Their locomotive factory at Newcastle upon Tyne soon outgrew its premises and a much larger site was founded at Darlington.

The father and son are well known for their pioneering work on the Stockton & Darlington and Liverpool & Manchester railways, but they engineered more than locomotives. Robert is responsible for some of the world's most innovative and impressive bridges and the company the Stephensons founded continued (as Robert Stephenson Hawthorn) to build locomotives for a burgeoning worldwide market for well over a century.
This book will tell its story and show its global influence.

George and Robert Stephenson's Rocket is arguably the most enduring silhouette in railway history. But why was Rocket that special? And why does the surviving locomotive look so unlike the striking yellow image that we are familiar with from books, postage stamps and the five pound note?

Rocket was built to take part in The Rainhill Trials, the competition to find a locomotive design to pull trains on the world's first passenger line, the Liverpool and Manchester. The trials caught the public's imagination and its victor, Rocket, became a sensation. It quickly became of symbol of technological progress.

The Stephensons' engine set the pattern for future world steam locomotive development for the next 130 years. But would the steam locomotive have developed differently if Rocket had not won the trials?
All these questions while exploring in words and pictures the machine that became the metaphor for what is seen as Britain's greatest gift to the industrial world: the steam locomotive.