Samson

Samson was an 0-4-0 tender locomotive built in 1838 for the Stockton and Darlington Railway by Timothy Hackworth at Shildon Works, representing one of the second generation of Stockton and Darlington locomotives that followed the pioneering Locomotion and its immediate successors of the 1820s. Hackworth had been resident engineer at the S&DR since 1825 and had developed considerable practical experience of what worked and what failed in early locomotive design on Britain's first public steam railway, and Samson benefited from this accumulated knowledge in its more robust and capable specification compared with the earliest S&DR engines.

The Stockton and Darlington Railway — opened in September 1825 as the world's first steam-hauled public railway — was by the late 1830s a well-established mineral railway handling the coal traffic of County Durham's expanding coalfield to the staiths at Stockton for coastal shipping. Hackworth's locomotives, including Samson, provided the motive power for this increasingly important coal traffic, working conditions that placed heavy demands on early locomotive design: the steep gradients descending from the coalfield, the heavy loaded wagons, and the frequent reversals and shunting movements of the colliery and staithes operations all tested the reliability of early steam locomotives.

Samson gave reliable service on S&DR coal traffic and represents an important step in the development of practical colliery and mineral railway motive power. One example associated with this period is preserved — the original Sans Pareil, Hackworth's Rainhill Trials entry, is at the National Railway Museum — and gives the best impression of Hackworth's locomotive work of the period.