Whinfield's Foundry, Gateshead

Whinfield's Foundry in Gateshead was a small Tyneside ironworks owned by John Whinfield where in 1805 Richard Trevithick had constructed his second known railway locomotive — the 'Gateshead Locomotive', built to Trevithick's designs and intended for use at Wylam Colliery on the Tyne. The locomotive was never successfully deployed on the colliery's wooden plateway, which proved insufficiently robust for its weight, and was instead put to work as a stationary blowing engine — a fate that Trevithick's Penydarren locomotive of 1804 had also suffered, demonstrating the gap that still existed between the locomotive's mechanical capability and the infrastructure's capacity to support it.

The Gateshead episode was Trevithick's second attempt to establish the railway locomotive as a practical working machine, and its partial failure — the locomotive worked mechanically but the track could not bear it — contributed to his gradual withdrawal from active railway development. The foundry itself was a typical small Tyneside engineering works of the early industrial era, participating in the locomotive experiments that characterised Tyneside engineering in the years before George Stephenson's Killingworth work of 1814 established the practical railway locomotive on a sounder engineering basis. Whinfield's Foundry represents the fragmented, trial-and-error character of the earliest locomotive engineering — important historical moments occurring in modest industrial settings whose subsequent documentary record is correspondingly thin.