William Hedley

Inventor, born in Newburn, Tyne and Wear, NE England, UK. A colliery official, he patented a design for a railway traction engine using smooth wheels on smooth rails. His locomotive was known as Puffing Billy, and was the first commercial steam locomotive, hauling coal trucks a distance of about 5 mi from the mine at Wylam to the dockside at Lemington-on-Tyne.

William Hedley (1773 – 1843) was one of the leading industrial engineers of the early 19th century, and was instrumental in several major innovations in early railway development. While working as a 'viewer' or manager at Wylam's Colliery near Newcastle upon Tyne, he built the first practical steam locomotive which relied simply on the adhesion of steel wheels on steel rails.

He was born in Newburn, near Newcastle upon Tyne in 1773. While most lines used cable haulage with stationary engines, various other schemes had been tried. William Chapman at the Butterley Company in 1812, attempted to use a steam engine which hauled itself along a cable, while, at the same company, Brunton had produced the even less successful "mechanical traveller", or Steam Horse.

However, in 1812, Matthew Murray and John Blenkinsop had produced The Salamanca, for Middleton Colliery near Leeds, using a pinion engaging with teeth along the track. This had been the first engine to work successfully, but the system was complex and expensive.

Hedley felt that if the pairs of wheels were connected, as with Trevithick's engines, if one pair began to slip, it would be counteracted by the other.

This engine was not satisfactory.

He built a second engine, with the assistance of the, later to be famous, Timothy Hackworth, his foreman smith, and his principal engine wright, Jonathan Foster, using the twin cylinder plan of John Blenkinsop and a return tube boiler. Its success encouraged them to build a second engine Wylam Dilly, which is now in the Royal Museum of Scotland.

However there was still considerable wear to the track, and the engines were rebuilt using twin four-wheeled bogies, introduced in Blackwell's design mentioned above.

Hedley died in 1843.