Volunteers restore replica 1800s steam locomotive

The engine will run for visitors of Blists Hill Victorian Town until December

Volunteers at Blists Hill Victorian Town in Telford have restored a full-scale working replica of the world's first steam railway locomotive.

The Trevithick was first designed by Richard Trevithick in 1802, with the original built in the Ironbridge Gorge by the Coalbrookdale Company.

After about eight months of repairs, the replica is running again for visitors for the first time in 18 months.

"We're thrilled to bits that we've finally got this engine back on its plateway, it's a pretty unique exhibit," said Trevor Barraclough, steam engineer and volunteer with the Ironbridge Gorge Museum Trust.

"We've done quite a lot of work to it, reboring the cylinders… replacing the heat tubes and the boiler, repairing things that have been done to it in the past, and trying to cope with old technology in a new technological environment.

"It's a very interesting thing to drive, but there's very little on it that's on a steam locomotive you might find on the Severn Valley.

He described it as a "clockwork version" of a steam train.

Trevor Barraclough was part of the team that restored the steam engine

"We believe it's the first steam powered locomotive to work on a track," he told the BBC.

"Trevithick had built many stationary engines, he came here to Coalbrookdale to produce this high pressure engine, in its day it was like nuclear physics - this thing was working at much higher pressure than the Cornish mine engines.

"It was feared, and rightly so, this thing was operating at four, five times the pressure of the contemporary engines and marked the ability to put a lot of energy in a very compact unit that could then be fitted to something reasonably sized on a set of rails."

He said that this engine industrialised the movement of things like coal, iron and clay.

"Before this engine was built, if you wanted to move wagons of coal up and down a plateway... you had to do it either by hand… or with horses."

"People and horses get tired, they need feeding… whereas a steam engine, the idea was it would do the work for you."

The engine is up and running at the Victorian Town and will continue to do so until the first hard frost in December.