There can be few people remotely interested in railway history who have not heard of the south Lancashire village of Rainhill. It was here in October 1829 that the directors of the Liverpool & Manchester Railway conducted a series of trials designed to discover the best locomotive for working their line. A £500 prize was offered which, as we used to say, “every schoolboy knows” was won by Stephenson's Rocket. Ask people which Stephenson and there may be some confusion.1
None of the entrants was a local product. Rocket was built at Robert Stephenson & Co.'s works at Forth Street, Newcastle, and transported overland to Carlisle, whence it was brought by sea to Liverpool. Timothy Hackworth's Sans Pareil was also built in the north east, John Braithwaite and John Ericsson's Novelty in London and Timothy Burstall's Perseverance in Leith.2 Consequently, it is generally believed that, as far as Lancashire was concerned, steam locomotives were a novel and exotic import from other parts of the country, especially the north east. Although the county would become the epicentre of the subsequent development of steam railways in England and the Manchester area would be one of the major locomotive-building centres in the country, steam traction is generally thought to have come late to Lancashire, more than twenty years after it first appeared elsewhere. It is true that another Stephenson locomotive, the Lancashire Witch, was at work on the Bolton & Leigh Railway over a year before Rainhill, but that was still a relatively late development.
However, there is in Wigan Archives at Leigh a letter written by one Robert Daglish, Senior, addressed to a Mr. Jones, Plasterer of 34 Mount Pleasant, Liverpool, from Orrell Cottage, near Wigan, and dated 1st April 1856. It was in reply to a letter from Mr. Jones “respecting the first application of Locomotive Engines in Lancashire.3 Daglish states:
“I made the first in this County in 1812, & put it on an extensive colliery, under my direction, into full action, at the beginning of 1813, which was nearly two years before Mr. Geo. Stephenson made a
