Wylam Colliery workshops

The Wylam Colliery workshops were the improvised engineering facilities at Wylam Colliery near Newcastle where the world's two oldest surviving steam locomotives — Puffing Billy and Wylam Dilly — were built in 1813–14 under the direction of colliery viewer William Hedley, enginewright Jonathan Forster, and the young blacksmith Timothy Hackworth. Unlike the more formally organised works at Forth Street Newcastle or the Round Foundry at Leeds, the Wylam workshops were the typical small-scale engineering facilities of a working colliery — a blacksmith's shop, a fitting shop, and the practical resources of an active mine — used to build something that had never been built before.

Hackworth's role at Wylam was fundamental: he physically made much of the ironwork for the locomotives, shaping and fitting the components that Hedley's designs required in the colliery smithy. This practical hands-on fabrication gave Hackworth an intimate knowledge of locomotive engineering that proved invaluable when he later became the Stockton and Darlington Railway's Locomotive Superintendent and subsequently established his own Soho Works at Shildon. George Stephenson grew up in the cottage directly beside the Wylam waggonway and observed Hedley's locomotive experiments as a young man — a formative influence on the engineer who would take the practical railway locomotive from colliery experiment to world-changing commercial reality.

Puffing Billy is preserved at the Science Museum in London as the world's oldest intact steam locomotive; Wylam Dilly is at the National Museum of Scotland in Edinburgh. Both are direct products of the Wylam Colliery workshops — unassuming facilities whose output changed the world.