Rail transport Kingdom in 1804 by Richard Trevithick, a British engineer born in Cornwall. This used high-pressure steam to drive the engine by one power stroke. The transmission system employed a large flywheel to even out the action of the piston rod. On 21 February 1804, the world's first steam-powered railway journey took place when Trevithick's unnamed steam locomotive hauled a train along the tramway of the Penydarren ironworks, near Merthyr Tydfil in South Wales. Trevithick later demonstrated a locomotive operating upon a piece of circular rail track in Bloomsbury, London, the "Catch Me Who Can", but never got beyond the experimental
Catch Me Who Can feasible. It would be another 20 years before Trevithick’s concept was fully realised at the Rainhill Trials of 1829, at which the pioneering railway engineers George Stephenson and Robert Stephenson successfully demonstrated the potential of their locomotive ’’Rocket’’. In 2008, the curator of the National Museum of Science and Industry, John Liffen, announced that the most widely-known depiction of "Catch Me Who Can" and the Bloomsbury demonstration track was likely a twentieth century forgery. Other depictions based on this influential work were in turn misleading. There are few reliable illustrations of the locomotive. Even before this, the lack of reliable