THE PASSENGER STEAM LOCOMOTIVE
The invention of the railway engine is not the achievement of any one man. But if a single ‘inventor’ must be named it should be Richard Trevithick. George Stephenson is the best known locomotive engineer, but his famous Rocket was by no means the first railway engine – it was something like the seventieth to be built in Britain. Older locomotives are still to be seen: Puffing Billy at the Science Museum in London, its fellow Wylam Dilly in the Royal Scottish Museum in Edinburgh, Locomotion at Darlington. But Rocket marked the turning-point in the development of the locomotive from a machine designed entirely for the slow haulage of coal to one that was able to handle passenger and general goods trains, which required greater flexibility and speed.


GLASGOW (QUEEN STREET) – EDINBURGH (WAVERLEY)
To anyone with a sense of history this railway has a special interest, for it moves along one of the oldest and most important natural lines of communication in the country, across the ‘waist’ of Scotland at its narrowest point. For twenty miles it runs close to, and it twice intersects, the Antonine Wall, built by the Romans in the second century AD; and for much of its course it is within sight of the Forth & Clyde Canal, one of the great engineering works of the 18th century.

Serving two large cities, moreover, each with a peculiar physical character of its own, it exemplifies some of the general problems faced by engineers in driving their railways into towns. One of the most important difficulties has been solved here with triumphant success: each terminus is conveniently situated near the centre of the city it serves.