The Rocket Men

The Rocket Men: George and Robert Stephenson - 1814-2014 Steam Bicentenary, written by Robin Jones, editor of Heritage Railway. In 2013, a team of archaeologists hunting for Roman remains in a derelict Tyneside shipyard stumbled across the remains of one of the world's first 'modern' railways. Buried beneath the surface lay the immaculately-preserved remains of a wooden-railed waggonway, built to 4ft 8in gauge - broadly the same as most of the world's railways today. It was on such a railway that George Stephenson - hailed as the greatest of the early steam engine pioneers - ran his first locomotive, Blucher, in 1814. Marking the 2014 bicentenary of Stephenson's first locomotive, this new biography looks in detail at the son of an illiterate colliery hand who used his first wages to educate himself at evening school - and coming from nowhere, went on reshape the globe through steam railways. It is also the story of his son Robert, who went on to become a greater engineer than his father, designing railways, locomotives and ground-breaking bridges across the world.