John Blenkinsop was an English mining engineer and an inventor of steam locomotives, who designed the first practical railway locomotive.
Blenkinsop's rack locomotive
Matthew Murray was an English steam engine and machine tool manufacturer, who designed and built the first commercially viable steam locomotive, the twin-cylinder Salamanca in 1812. He was an innovati
John Blenkinsop
…five tons, Blenkinsop was less sanguine. In 1811 he patented (No 3431), a rack and pinion system for a locomotive which would be designed and built by Matthew Murray of Fenton, Murray and Wood in Holbeck. The general opinion of the time was that a locomotive would draw up to four times its weight by adhesion alone…
Technical drawing of a 4hp steam engine by Fenton, Murray & Wood, 1802. "Applied to a mill for grinding bark", by Joseph Wilson Lowry, after John Farey
The Collier, aquatint by Robert Havell after George Walker, published in 1814, from Costumes of Yorkshire, showing Blenkinsop's rack locomotive Salamanca on the Middleton Railway. The image features the earliest known representation of a steam train.
A memorial to Matthew Murray in Holbeck, Leeds