Letter from Thomas Hackworth, Shipston on Stour to John Wesley Hackworth

Copy letter. Seven years apprenticeship at Wylam Colliery when first locomotive steam engines made there ‘make many of the parts with my own hands’. Exhaust steam was taken into the chimney by a pipe ‘so as not to interfere with the comfort of the drivers’ ‘ but no idea if a blast pipe was dreamt up at that time’. Referenced in Robert Young, Timothy Hackworth and the Locomotive (London: Locomotive Publishing Company, 1923), p. 216.