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'Spotting' a first in world history
Think about world firsts in rail history and the majority of the British public will picture steam-driven powerhouses such as Flying Scotsman or Mallard thundering through the mind’s eye at a blistering 100 miles per hour.
But what about the world’s first ‘trainspotter’?
As long as the passenger train has existed, there has been a devoted body of men (and women) that have passionately followed its path across the British countryside. The first rail enthusiasts were progressive thinkers, those that recognised the potential of the railways to change the world.
The opening of the first permanent steam locomotive railway, the Stockton and Darlington Railway on September 27 1825, marked a seminal moment in world history.
On that momentous day, a teenage boy wrote his account of events, making him the first child rail enthusiast known in history and perhaps therefore the world’s first true ‘trainspotter’.
John Backhouse, a 14-year old Quaker from County Durham wrote to his sister in London to describe the birth of passenger rail transport and when he fails to find the words to describe the exciting new phenomena he drew the steam-hauled train that had caught his imagination so intensely.
The ‘Backhouse Letter’, written in October 1825, is a key item in the National Collection housed in the National Railway Museum’s new interactive Archive & Research Centre Search Engine. As the letter contains the world’s first child’s drawing of a train, it is considered to be the world’s first example of trainspotting.
However, visitors to Search Engine can work out from other records of the opening of the Stockton and Darlington Railway that there are a few discrepancies in John Backhouse’s account of the events of September 27. Could this mean the author may not have been an eye-witness despite his drawing of the train and attention to detail? Or are these small slips just down to a boy’s sheer excitement at the awesome sight he had witnessed?
Visit Search Engine and decide for yourself if John Backhouse was indeed the world’s first child rail enthusiast or if you side with the sceptics who question his right to claim the title of the world’s first boy to go trainspotting.
7 January 2008