Head of Steam, Darlington Railway Museum

Head of Steam at Darlington North Road is one of the most historically significant railway museum sites in Britain — located in the original 1842 station of the world's first public steam railway, the Stockton and Darlington Railway, and housing Locomotion No. 1, the locomotive that hauled the inaugural SDR train from Shildon to Darlington on 27 September 1825. North Road station is the oldest surviving substantial railway station building in the world still on its original site and still associated with the railway for which it was built.

The museum's centrepiece is Locomotion No. 1 — not a replica but the actual locomotive built by Robert Stephenson and Co. in 1825, which hauled the world's first passenger train on a public steam railway. Alongside it stands Derwent, an 1845 North Eastern Railway 0-6-0 representative of the generation of locomotives that consolidated the Stockton and Darlington's coal-carrying operations in the years after Locomotion's pioneering run. Together the two locomotives span twenty years of early railway development and illustrate the pace of technical change in that formative period.

Head of Steam complements the Locomotion museum at Shildon — where the National Railway Museum's northern outpost holds a further substantial collection — and the two sites together tell the complete story of the Stockton and Darlington Railway and its extraordinary place in world history. Darlington itself, shaped by the railway industry that the SDR created, provides the urban context: the town's Victorian engineering and manufacturing heritage is visible throughout its streets and public buildings.