Firstly, credit where credit is more than due, this is by  wings-and-strings go fave the original here: https://www.furaffinity.net/view/25941115/
I’ve had the idea for this work for years, but didn’t know of an artist who would do justice to the locomotive and capture the historical significance of what I wanted to portray.
As soon as I stumbled upon wings-and-strings, I knew I had found the artist I wanted, and he did not disappoint.
And I would absolutely recommend him to anyone else, he was professional throughout the process, kept me informed of progress and provided WIPs at a steady rate.
A few more credits are also due.
The character on the foot-plate beside me is my good friend  aurumonca, I can’t think of anyone more suitable for the role.
And the eagle-eyed amongst you (or even just the plain eagles) may spot  linfox,  saerriusvarhken and  prince-panda taking in the spectacle.
Thanks to all of them for letting me use their characters, and apologies to those whom I asked who ended up not making an appearance.

But onto the work itself!
This is where I reveal myself as an irreparable railfan.
I’ve loved steam trains for as long as I can remember.
I blame the Thomas the Tank Engine TV show (you can tell how old I am because I call it that rather than ‘Thomas and Friends’) and the toy trains I was given as a child, but there’s something about the sound of steam hissing from unknown pipes, the trill of a steam whistle and the smell of burning coal that I find captivating.

The genesis of this work comes from a lithograph print found in ‘The Lore of the Train’ by C. Hamilton Ellis, one of several book about trains I had (and still have, in this case).
It depicts Stephenson servicing the Northumbrian, (which is very similar to Rocket) in full top-hat-and-tails.
I found the depiction of an engine driver in formalwear beautifully incongruous.
For us, engine driver is such a working-class and dirty (when steam engines are involved) job that to see it was once expected that they should wear top-hat-and-tails shows how different the past was.

It make me wonder if those who attended the Trials realised that they were experiencing a moment in history.
Did it occur to them that they were seeing the future barrelling down the rails?
Did the farmers and tradesmen see how it would provide them with new opportunities to sell their trade and wares and provide them with a new freedom to explore the world outside their village?
Were there landed gentry spectating who realised how much of a threat to their way of life this would represent?
To me, this represents the turning point between the mannered pastoralism of the Gregorian era (typified by Jane Austen) and the audacious industrialism of the Victorian era.
This is, of course, a false demarcation, brought about by my own prejudices.
Newcomen had invented the first steam engine over 100 years earlier, the spinning jenny made its appearence about 50 years after that, and the ‘canal mania’ that had gripped Britain for the decades before the Trials show that industrialisation was booming.

So why to we celebrate and remember Rocket and the Rainhill trials, and see them as a turning point in history?
Rocket itself is an interesting beast.
It seems that all of its ‘innovations’ had featured in earlier locomotives.
The multi-tube boiler was used by Marc Seguin in France at almost the exact same time as the Trials.
And the beautiful but tragic Novelty, which you can see struggling on the far right, had a fire-tube that looped back and forth through the boiler, a good idea in theory, but totally impractical as it causes ash to clog the tube.
Stephenson’s own Lancashire_Witch featured a blast pipe, directly coupled driving wheels and pistons off the vertical.
It’s only in the combination of these features that Rocket becomes unique.
But it also lacks many features that would become standard in just a few years.
It doesn’t have a smoke-box and those elevated, off-horizontal pistons raise the centre of gravity, leading to a rough ride.
Both of those defects are gone in the Planet, built less than a year later, and Rocket itself would be modified to lower the pistons and add a firebox before it entered into regular services.
The addition of another set of leading wheels in the Patentee allowed for a larger firebox, and it’s really this design that we see repeated for nearly the next 100 years.
To draw a parallel with the development of computers, I guess we should consider the Rocket equivalent to the original Apple computer: a prototype of things to come (i.e. the Planet/Patentee and the Apple II) but still with several underdeveloped areas that needed improving.
But despite all this, maybe we can say that it was really the first locomotive capable of doing what we would expect a locomotive to do: operate at a sustained speed and efficiency, allowing it to operate a regular intercity service.
Which means perhaps the real revolution was the Liverpool & Manchester Railway itself: it was the first time such a service was conceived of, and so the first to place such demands on a locomotive.

Or maybe it was the simple publicity generated by the trails, I can’t discount that possibility.