Wallsend Waggonway (Wallsend Colliery)

The Wallsend Colliery and its Wallsend Waggonway on the north bank of the River Tyne were among the most historically significant of the many Tyneside colliery railways — a working context for early locomotive experiment that produced the Steam Elephant of around 1815, one of the earliest twin-cylinder steam locomotives. The colliery was managed by John Buddle (1773–1843), 'the King of the Coal Trade', whose expertise in colliery ventilation and underground engineering made him the leading authority on deep coal mining in the Great Northern Coalfield — and whose collaboration with the consulting engineer William Chapman produced the Steam Elephant as a practical attempt to mechanise the Wallsend Waggonway.

The Steam Elephant, built around 1815, used two vertical cylinders driving a common crankshaft — an early version of the twin-cylinder arrangement that would become standard in subsequent steam locomotive development. Chapman's associated chain-drive patent, which proposed propelling a locomotive by hauling on a fixed chain rather than relying on wheel-rail adhesion, was an alternative approach to the traction problem that William Hedley's Puffing Billy experiments at Wylam were simultaneously proving unnecessary. The Wallsend work thus represents one of several parallel lines of early locomotive experiment in north-east England that converged on the practical steam railway of the 1820s.

The Wallsend Colliery's coal — 'Wallsend coal' — was for much of the Victorian era the premium quality benchmark for household coal on the London market, and the colliery's output helped sustain the enormous Tyneside coal trade that gave north-east England its economic character. A working replica of the Steam Elephant was built in 2002 and operates at Beamish Museum.