| The "Rocket" and a modern English locomotive. The "Rocket," the best of Stephenson's early locomotives, was a four-wheel engine supported on springs, with a boiler six feet long. It weighed four and a quarter tons, and in the first run on the Liverpool and Manchester railway it made an average speed of fifteen miles an hour. The modern English locomotive (circa 1920) weighs nearly sixty tons, and travels several times as fast as the little "Rocket." |
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