EMBSAY’S WORLD FIRST! THE SECOND DAWN OF MODERN TRACTION
Stephenson’s Rocket is a household name, like Flying Scotsman. Rainhill Trials winner Rocket became the blueprint for all future steam locomotive development, 25 years after Richard Trevithick gave the first demonstration of a railway locomotive.
Both Rocket and Trevithick’s 1804 locomotive are world transport history landmarks cast in iron and set in stone, and both have been the subject of working replicas.
Not so another ground-breaking traction item, in the form of the world’s first passenger vehicle powered by an internal combustion engine, and therefore the ancestor of most of the world’s trains today.
Half a century ahead of its time in 1903, astonishingly it escaped the attention of museum curators, enthusiasts and preservationists for seven decades after withdrawal.
When vintage coach restorer Stephen Middleton realised its phenomenal value and rescued it from a North Yorkshire field 15 years ago,
