The opening of the Liverpool & Manchester Railway is rightly considered a milestone in world history, but in truth the opening day itself was a disaster. 

• It started by shooting a man in the face with a cannon 
• It was the scene of protests which led the Prime Minister to flee a city (no less a man than the "Iron" Duke of Wellington, at that!)
• It killed one of its greatest supporters with a machine it was trying to convince the public was safe

 

The final episode in our mini-series on the L&MR explores the formal opening of the world’s first modern railway on the 15th September 1830, and the first few locomotives to operate on the line.

 

Chapter notes:

00:00 Start

02:00 Last episode’s trivia answer

02:42 A crowd gathers at Edge Hill

04:00 The locomotives: Arrow, Comet, Dart, Meteor, Northumbrian, North Star, Phoenix and Rocket  

05:15 The inaugural trains and the great and the good

06:25 The Duke of Wellington’s coach

08:27 Northumbrian’s tender

09:10 The first (official) railway journey

12:12 William Huskisson

13:52 Parkside Station

16:25 The Rocket locomotive hits Huskisson

18:00 Navvy killed on the L&MR a year earlier in the same way

18:55 Back on the line

21:47 Antagonistic crowd come to see Old Nosey (or, Michael gets distracted by a potted history of British revolutions that nearly happened)

23:50 Peterloo, Power-loom riots, Voting reform and Charles X

25:25 The Iron Duke leaves Manchester… then the railway… then office

27:50 Early locos

28:15 Braithwaite & Ericsson’s William the Fourth and Queen Adelaide locomotives

29:58 Robert Stephensons’ Rocket class locomotives

33:15 Introduction of the Planet locomotive class 

37:00 Conclusion

39:03 Trivia question