Wylam Colliery (Wylam Waggonway)

The Wylam Colliery and its Wylam Waggonway, eight miles west of Newcastle on the north bank of the River Tyne, occupy a unique place in railway history as the site where the world's two oldest surviving steam locomotives were built and where George Stephenson was born and grew up — the physical and biographical origin of the railway age concentrated in a single Northumberland village. The waggonway ran from the colliery along the Tyne bank to the coal staiths at Lemington, originally as a wooden plateway of around 1748 vintage and relaid in iron cast-iron plate rails from 1808.

Under the direction of colliery viewer William Hedley, working with enginewright Jonathan Forster and the young blacksmith Timothy Hackworth, the Wylam locomotives Puffing Billy and Wylam Dilly were built in 1813–14 — the world's oldest surviving steam locomotives. Both worked the Wylam Waggonway for nearly fifty years, a remarkable commercial longevity for any steam locomotive, before passing into preservation. Puffing Billy is now at the Science Museum in London; Wylam Dilly is at the National Museum of Scotland in Edinburgh. Hedley's critical contribution at Wylam was the experimental proof that smooth-wheeled locomotives could achieve adequate traction on smooth iron rails without rack mechanisms — the foundational demonstration that made the adhesion railway possible.

George Stephenson's birth cottage at Wylam, which stood directly alongside the waggonway — the infant Stephenson growing up beside the very track on which early steam experiments were conducted — is preserved by the National Trust as a heritage property. The connection between Stephenson's Wylam childhood and his subsequent career as the father of the railway age is one of the most remarkable biographical coincidences in the history of technology.