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For over a year, Guy helps with the re-build of a replica of the original locomotive, learning how to hot rivet – an essential skill used in the construction of pretty much every steam engine boiler ever built. He then helps take Locomotion for its first test drive on a homemade rail track out the back of a workshop in Loughborough.

 

Guy also learns how the story of the steam railway started on the canals on barges pulled by horses and how the faster, cheaper and more efficient railway network became the primary form of transport across every inhabited continent for the next decade, and solidified the UK’s position as the world’s pre-eminent superpower.

Guy also meets up with the world’s most famous – and enthusiastic - train spotter, Francis Bourgeois, to get sense of why trains arouse such passions in so many people.

 

Then exactly 200 years after that historic trip along the Stockton and Darlington Railway, Guy joins the crew on the footplate of Locomotion No.1 as it sets out once more watched by big crowds on the 26-mile journey from Shildon to Stockton-on-Tees.