The Wylam waggon-way is one of the oldest in the north of England. Down to the year 1807 it was formed of wooden spars or rails, laid down between the colliery at Wylam—where old Robert Stephenson had worked—and the village of Lemington, some four miles down the Tyne, where the coals were loaded into keels or barges, and floated down past Newcastle, to be shipped for London. Each chaldron-waggon had a man in charge of it, and was originally drawn by one horse. The rate at which the waggons were hauled was so slow that only two journeys were performed by each man and horse in one day, and three on the day following. This primitive waggon-way passed, as before stated, close in front of the cottage in which George Stephenson was born; and one of the earliest sights which met his infant eyes was this wooden tramroad worked by horses. Mr. Blackett was the first colliery owner in the North who took an active interest in the locomotive. Having formed the acquaintance of Trevithick in London, and inspected the performances of his engine, he determined to repeat the Pen-y-darran experiment upon the Wylam waggon-way. He accordingly obtained from Trevithick, in October, 1804, a plan of his engine, provided with “friction-wheels,” and employed Mr. John Whinfield, of Pipewellgate, Gateshead, to construct it at his foundry there. The engine was constructed under the superintendence of one John Steele, an ingenious mechanic who had been in Wales, and worked under Trevithick in fitting the engine at Pen-y-darran. When the Gateshead locomotive was finished, a temporary way was laid down in the works, on which it was run backwards and forwards many times. For some reason, however—it is said because the engine was deemed too light for drawing the coal-trains—it never left the works, but was dismounted from the wheels, and set to blow the cupola of the foundry, in which service it long continued to be employed. Several years elapsed before Mr. Blackett took any further steps to carry out his idea. The final abandonment of Trevithick’s locomotive at Pen-y-darran perhaps contributed to deter him from proceeding further; but he had the wooden tramway taken up in 1808, and a plate-way of cast-iron laid down instead—a single line furnished with sidings to enable the laden waggons to pass the empty ones. The new iron road proved so much smoother than the old wooden one, that a single horse, instead of drawing one, was now enabled to draw two, or even three, laden waggons.