NATIONAL TREASURES: LYON
The Stephenson engine that wasn’t
“Repeat a lie often enough and it will become the truth.”
Often (if unreliably) attributed to Nazi partisan Joseph Goebbels, that quote – and variants thereof – is one of the fundamental mechanisms of propaganda. In Lyon’s case, it is entirely apt.
Long believed to have been built by railway pioneer George Stephenson in the early 1820s, thanks to a mistruth first postulated at the dawn of the 20th Century
(and subsequently repeated), for years Lyon has remained an enigma few had been able to decipher. Now, recent research has revealed that this hitherto baffling machine was, in fact, built in around 1849 and had almost nothing to do with Stephenson.
So, how did such a fundamental misunderstanding about Lyon’s true lineage first come about, and why did it stand uncorrected for so long?
ALTERNATIVE FACTS
Lyon’s story, as we have believed it to be, really begins in 1902, when Lambton & the Hetton Collieries Coal Co. – then owners of the Hetton colliery and railway for which Lyon had been built – announced that it planned to withdraw the engine from service and display it at Durham college in Newcastleupon-Tyne. In what can be described as an early form of press release, the company proclaimed Lyon, which by that point had lost its nameplates, as having been built by George Stephenson, with help from Hetton colliery viewer (or manager) Nicholas Wood, in 1822, making it the world’s oldest working locomotive.
The press and the public alike swallowed that claim hook, line and sinker, but as it turns out, it was “fake news”, as Dr Michael Bailey MBE – president of the Stephenson Locomotive Society and noted early railway historian who led Lyon’s recent survey – describes. However, the announcement had a positive if undoubtedly unintended effect. The Edwardian public was fascinated by the notion that a George Stephenson locomotive was still in service in the 20th Century and the news generated so much interest that the colliery company felt compelled to keep Lyon in service. Thus, the veteran 0-4-0 carried on working for a further decade, when a serious accident in 1912 resulted not only in a cracked cylinder and damaged slidebars, but also its ultimate withdrawal.
Believing they had a genuine George Stephenson relic on their hands – and one which had been working almost continuously for 90 years – the company retained Lyon and stored it in the colliery’s waggon shed.
In 1924, the publicity-conscious London & North Eastern Railway began preparing to celebrate the impending 100th anniversary of its ancestor, the Stockton & Darlington Railway. Key to these celebrations was a parade of locomotives, the likes of which the country had never seen before, featuring designs from not only across the LNER and its constituents, but also from the other ‘Big Four’ companies.
Instinctively, the LNER wanted to steam the two surviving S&DR relics – George Stephenson’s Locomotion and Timothy Hackworth’s Derwent – but while the latter proved to be capable of steaming (despite being 80 years old), the former was too fragile to move under its own power. Instead, it was powered by a petrol engine hidden in its tender (SR503) and, in the event, it brought up the rear of the cavalcade with a replica S&DR train, but it left the organisers without a Stephenson locomotive with which to open the parade, as they so desired.
No doubt aware of the recent publicity surrounding the locomotive, the LNER turned to Hetton and Lyon. But, as it was believed to be of a similar vintage to Locomotion – and having supposedly endured a working life of 59 years more than its 1825-built counterpart – would Lyon be any more capable of steaming?
To find out, the LNER transferred Lyon from Hetton to its works at Darlington where it underwent a thorough examination and repair. So extensive were these works, that Dr Bailey says much of what we see today actually dates from 1925. Alas, no records survive of exactly what work was done – Dr Bailey believes record cards from this era were unceremoniously disposed of in a skip many years ago – but certainly the LNER repaired the cracked cylinder and damaged slidebars that had resulted in the locomotive’s withdrawal in 1912, and also fitted new tyres and flanges in preparation for its main line appearance in July that year.
Thus, after being displayed at the LNER’s Faverdale wagon works in Darlington on July 1, Lyon – a supposed Stephenson veteran that was believed to be over a century old – represented the so-called ‘Father of the Railways’, venturing under its own power onto the main line for the Stockton & Darlington centenary parade the following day, where it steamed past a specially erected grandstand next to the lineside near Stockton, in front of the Duke and Duchess of York, later King George VI and the Queen Mother. In retrospect, it was an imposter.
And yet the choice of Lyon could not have been more appropriate. The Duchess, Elizabeth Angela Marguerite Bowes-Lyon, was the great-great-grand niece of John Lyon, the owner of the estate on which Hetton colliery was sunk and after whom Lyon was named.
After its star turn at the parade, Lyon was offered to the LNER’s embryonic Queen Street museum in York, where it would ultimately share space with some of the other engines from that momentous parade. When the museum closed in the early 1970s, instead of moving to the newly established National Railway Museum in the former York North roundhouse, Lyon was transferred to Beamish, where it remained almost continuously until April 2019 when it was taken to Locomotion at Shildon for a proper, archaeological and archival investigation by Dr Bailey and his colleague Peter Davidson to find out exactly what this mysterious locomotive really was.
Throughout the intervening 92 years, it had always been displayed with an accompanying information board
The press and public alike swallowed that claim hook, line and sinker, but as it turns out, it was “fake news”
bearing the legend ‘built by George Stephenson, 1822’, a succinct summation of what was known about the locomotive. Or, at least, what we thought we knew…
THREE OF A KIND
Thanks to Dr Bailey and Peter Davidson’s recent survey, we now know that Lyon was actually the first of three similar locomotives – in addition to Lady Barrington and Fox, built between 1849 and 1854, all of whom were named after local landowners connected to the colliery. They were designed and built, not by Stephenson, but by Hetton’s chief engineer, James Gair, assisted by second engineer William Moor and foreman James Young. Gair died in 1850 and Moor took over responsibility for the second and third locomotives.
The irony is that Lyon is a George Stephenson machine in almost every other respect. Compare it, for instance, to the 1825 Locomotion or the 1816-built Killingworth ‘Billy’ in particular.
Outwardly, they are very similar engines; they are four-coupled locomotives primarily intended to haul coal, with a pair of vertical cylinders aligned one behind the other, embedded in the top centre line of the boiler, driving the wheels via lateral crossheads and connecting rods acting upon crankpins. Detail differences aside, all three locomotives employ the classic Stephenson locomotive arrangement. But, while Locomotion and ‘Billy’ are genuine Stephenson products, Lyon is not. Far from being relatively contemporaneous to Locomotion, as previously believed, Lyon is actually younger by a quarter of a century and more mechanically advanced, and Stephenson died at least a year before Lyon is now believed to have been built. So, if Lyon isn’t a Stephenson locomotive, what on earth is it, and why was it built to such an archaic design?
STEPHENSON’S STEAM ENGINES
Let’s start at the beginning.
On December 19 1820, the Hetton Coal Company started sinking the shaft of what would eventually become the Hetton Colliery, near the village of Hettonle-Hole, just south of Sunderland in what was then County Durham (now Tyne & Wear). To transfer their coal directly onto coastal colliers on the River Wear, eight miles distant, the mine owners decided to build a railway and, in July 1820, invited local engineers to submit proposals for such a line. The man they chose was George Stephenson.
By the time of his appointment, Stephenson had already made a name for himself as one of the North East’s most prominent engineers. In July 1814, in his capacity as enginewright at the West Moor Colliery near Killingworth, Northumberland, he built his first locomotive – Blucher – with assistance and encouragement from the colliery’s then viewer, or manager, Nicholas Wood. It was the first of seven locomotives (including the aforementioned ‘Billy’) Stephenson built for use at Killingworth.
Featuring a pair of vertical cylinders one behind the other embedded in the top centre line of a single flue boiler, Stephenson’s Killingworth locomotives drew heavily on those designed by Matthew Murray for the Middleton Railway in Leeds in 1812. It was understandable for Stephenson to follow Murray’s concept, as the Middleton engines were the most successful steam locomotives in the world at the time, and engines built to the same design were also used on both the Kenton & Coxlodge and Orrell colliery waggonways near Newcastle and Wigan respectively, as well as overseas. So, in his typical fashion, Stephenson took a good idea and improved it.
His Killingworth engines were therefore simple but robust and reliable, and capable of hauling – according to trials conducted in 1821 – “20 laden coal-wagons, the aggregate of which, with the engine itself, may be estimated at nearly 100 tons, with an amazing degree of rapidity.”
Therefore, when it came to deciding what motive power to employ on the Hetton railway, Stephenson naturally elected to perpetuate his Killingworth design, thus cementing the idea of a ‘standard’ Stephenson locomotive.
SMOKING GUN
Though the engines may not have been, the Hetton railway itself was revolutionary; it was the first allmechanical railway, using a combination of locomotives, rope-worked inclines and self-acting inclines. In this manner, it established the blueprint for the initial
Within five minutes of looking at it, we knew there was no way it was built in 1822 DR MICHAEL BAILEY MBE
operation of the Stockton & Darlington Railway, for which Stephenson was also engineer.
Locomotives were used from the line’s opening in November 1822 on the 1½-mile section from the pithead to the first rope-worked incline over Warden Law Hill, and on the 2½-mile stretch before the incline down to the staiths on the banks of the River Wear. Stephenson ultimately built five locomotives for use at Hetton – three in 1822 (Dart, Tallyho and Star) and two in 1823 – all similar to his previous Killingworth machines, and Lyon was long believed to have been one of the original trio, or a rebuild of one.
However, Michael and Peter’s research has proved there is no way it could have been built in 1822 for one very simple reason: the boiler.
Dr Bailey says: “Within five minutes of looking at it, we knew there was no way it was built in 1822, because the longitudinal boiler plates were too large for any ironworks at the time.” Furthermore, though it looks like a typical Stephenson-pattern single-flue boiler, it is in fact multi-tubular, meaning that it at least succeeded 1829’s Rocket.
There was another ‘smoking gun’ that demolished the 1822 myth: the frames. They are, as Dr Bailey says, “enormous”; being 14 feet long and cut from plate 22in wide and one inch thick: “There is absolutely no way any ironworks could have rolled plates that big in the 1820s.”
What sealed the deal was a press report on the opening of new iron rolling mills at the Derwent Iron Company’s Consett Iron Works in County Durham in 1848, which stated that “the largest plate of iron ever manufactured in this district had just been rolled” at 14ft 3in long, proving that Lyon’s frames could not have been built before 1848.
In fact, the iron for Lyon’s frames, boiler plates and other components was actually rolled at Consett and transferred to the firm’s Bishopwearmouth Iron Works in Sunderland to be fashioned into locomotive components, which were then ultimately assembled at Hetton.
“After the boiler and the frames, there’s not much else,” quips Dr Bailey. Thus far, all the evidence pointed to a locomotive built in the late 1840s, rather than 1822.
The trio of Lyon, Lady Barrington and Fox were driven by three brothers – Jimmy, Jack and Dick Ford – and in December 1858, Lady Barrington’s boiler exploded, killing Jimmy and his ten-year-old son. The subsequent inquest provided lots of information to Michael and Peter about the locomotives and how they were built, including confirmation of their manufacture at Bishopwearmouth.
In 1857, Hetton abandoned the earlier Killingworthpattern engines and bought more modern locomotives from, ironically, Robert Stephenson & Co., and while Lady Barrington was destroyed the following year, Lyon remained in use for another 55 years, receiving a heavy rebuild in 1882 in which its original wooden tender was replaced (the current tank dates from its 1925 rebuild at Darlington). The fate of Fox is unknown.
OCCAM’S RAZOR
Looking at the materials and techniques used to build Lyon explains when it was built, but not why. By the late 1840s, Stephenson’s early locomotives were obsolete and had been superseded by newer, more technologically advanced designs, so why was Lyon built at all?
One long-standing theory, to which Dr Bailey formerly subscribed, was that Lyon was built at the behest of Hetton colliery manager Sir Lindsay Wood, son of Stephenson’s early partner and later Hetton colliery manager Nicholas Wood.
In his book, Loco Motion: The World’s Oldest Steam Locomotives, published in 2014, Dr Bailey suggested: “The ‘Hetton’ locomotive was built as a ‘lookalike’ rather than as an accurate portrayal of its forebear.
[Sir Lindsay] Wood apparently arranged for the replica to be built out of sentiment for his father’s and George Stephenson’s endeavours 30 years earlier, presumably to
demonstrate that the basic design was still economical and ‘fit for purpose’ in the latter part of the 19th Century.”
Such a theory explains why Lyon was built with a modern multi-tubular boiler and proper smokebox, but as Sir Lindsay would have been 16 years old at the time Lyon was built, it seems unlikely that someone so young would have been able to authorise the construction of such a locomotive. Furthermore, Wood junior did not become managing director of Hetton Collieries until 1866, upon his father’s death – around 17 years after Lyon was built. The replica theory therefore doesn’t quite add up.
The truth is a classic case of Occam’s Razor; Lyon, Lady Barrington and Fox were built simply because the design, though archaic, was good.
By 1849, the original Stephenson quintet had done over 25 years of sterling service at Hetton and were still in traffic, doing the job for which they had been designed. However, the colliery needed more motive power to support them. “Hetton was familiar with the Stephenson locomotives and how they worked, so why change a good thing?” asks Dr Bailey.
Thus, Lyon and its brethren were built along Stephenson principles, but using contemporary materials and techniques and incorporating ‘modern’ componentry, such as the multi-tubular boiler. Dr Bailey says: “Stephenson would have certainly recognised the arrangement of the locos, but not the materials used.”
A DELIBERATE PLOY
Given that it took both Michael and Peter only five minutes of observation to conclude that Lyon wasn’t built in 1822, how come it is only now that its origins have been questioned?
Actually, doubts over Lyon’s provenance have existed almost as long as the claims of its Stephenson ancestry; even in 1902, at the time the claims were first made, various trade publications received correspondence challenging their veracity.
In 1995, railway historian Michael Rutherford proposed in Backtrack magazine that Lyon was not built in 1822 but was a ‘lookalike’ replica built in the 1850s, while former NRM senior curator and Beamish Keeper of Industry Jim Rees also questioned its origins as part of his paper to the 2nd International Early Railways Conference in 2001, so suspicions over its true history have existed for some time, but it is only now that a proper, formal investigation has been undertaken to conclusively prove (or disprove) those doubts.
So, to the biggest question of all: why was Lyon described as a Stephenson locomotive in the first place? Sir Lindsay Wood, who would have been at least aware of its origins, was still alive in 1902 (and was president of the North of England Mining Institute & Mechanical Engineers at the time) and would have known the truth. So, was it a genuine case of mistaken identity on the part of Lambton & Hetton Collieries, or a deliberate ploy to obscure the truth?
Dr Bailey suspects it was an intentional act to impress the colliery’s owners. But, he points out: “The fake news put out in 1902 saved Lyon. Had it been just another old loco, it would have been scrapped. The LNER genuinely believed it dated from 1822; remember, this was at a time when Stephenson could do no wrong. If they knew the truth, which I doubt they did, they hushed it up.”
However, it is probable that we will never know the real answer. Either way, as Dr Bailey attests, that single act – whether it was intentional or not – saved Lyon and ensured its preservation for posterity.
LAST PIECE OF THE PUZZLE
What next for this quirky 0-4-0 enigma? With the 200th anniversary of the Hetton colliery and railway only a couple of years away, Dr Bailey and Peter Davidson’s report recommends budgeting for the removal of the locomotive’s remaining asbestos which would allow further renovation and, crucially, reinstatement of Lyon’s connecting rods – making it a complete locomotive once more. The pair also hope Lyon’s nameplate will be reinstated, restoring the identity it’s lacked for so long.
Whatever happens in Lyon’s future, its past can finally be well and truly laid to rest. It took a lie to save Lyon and thrust it into the public eye, but it took the truth for us to properly appreciate what a national treasure it really is.