Trevithick London Demonstration ('Steam Circus')

The Trevithick Steam Circus of 1808 was a public demonstration mounted by Richard Trevithick on a circular track near Euston Square in London — the first time that a steam locomotive had carried paying passengers, and an attempt to interest London's engineering and investing community in the commercial possibilities of steam railway transport, twenty-two years before the Liverpool and Manchester Railway would prove those possibilities on a commercial scale.

Trevithick's locomotive 'Catch Me Who Can' — built by Hazledine and Rastrick at Bridgnorth, the same firm that would later build the Agenoria for the Shutt End Railway and the Stourbridge Lion for America — ran around a circular track of about 100 ft diameter at what Trevithick claimed was 12 mph, hauling an open carriage. Trevithick charged a shilling per ride and attracted curious Londoners, but failed to generate the serious commercial interest he sought. When one of the lightly-laid track rails broke under the locomotive, ending the demonstration after a few weeks, Trevithick abandoned the project.

The Steam Circus was Trevithick's last serious British attempt to commercialise railway locomotion. Financially exhausted and temperamentally unsuited to the patient business of attracting investors, he subsequently pursued projects in South America, where he spent eleven years before returning to England in poverty in 1827. The passenger railway that the Steam Circus anticipated was left to others — principally George Stephenson — to develop into commercial reality. Trevithick died in 1833, four years after Stephenson's Liverpool and Manchester Railway had demonstrated exactly what Trevithick had tried to show in a London field twenty-five years earlier.