The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #124637   Message #2754829
Posted By: GUEST,Edthefolkie
29-Oct-09 - 11:10 AM
Thread Name: Darlington to Stockton Railway
Subject: RE: Darlington to Stockton Railway
Based on no evidence whatsoever, I'll bet somebody wrote some sort of verse/song for the opening of the S&D in 1825. Probably we just haven't found it yet! After all, just about every railway opening inspired someone eg T. Baker, Liverpool and Manchester, 1830, oh dear:

At length the Steam-Chiefs with replenish'd force
To Manchester puesued their pageant course
A grand reception there secure they found
And though acclaim sill made the air resound
The blithe response was clogg'd with grief's alloy
The fate of Huskisson still chill'd their joy
The mutual greetings and the banquet o'er
The Steam-Chiefs in procession as before
With equal pomp and eight-fold gorgeous train (etc, etc).

And part of a broadside about the Oxford and Wolverhampton (the Old Worse and Worse) which is on Digitrad and elsewhere:

I will ride by steam and work by steam
By steam I'll on be hurried
And when I can a husband find
By stea I will be married

Rifum, Tifum, mirth and fun
Don't you wonder how it's done
Carriages without horses run
On the Hampton and Oxford Railway.

There is an awful lot of railway material which just hasn't made it into books and especially on to the Internet - it's shut up in local collections, in private hands, probably in the British Library, the National Railway Museum, etc. For instance there was a terrific controversy in the 1820s about "who invented the blast-pipe - George Stephenson or Timothy Hackworth?". This fuss was parodied in a hilarious pamphlet printed at the time of the 50th anniversary of the S&D in 1875, complete with Punch-style cartoons. An article appeared in the Eailway Magazine in the 1930s, a copy of which I inherited (and lost). But where's the original? In the depths of the NRM outstation at Shildon maybe, or at Forth St in Newcastle? At the bottom of a pile in a secondhand bookshop? Sorry, I'm not volunteering.....