The story of railway engineers George and Robert Stephenson is one of the greatest ever told. The offspring of an illiterate colliery hand and his son developed the steam locomotive concept to the point where it became universally accepted as the primary mode of land transport, and in doing so not only paved the way for the British railway network, but opened up the five continents with rapid communication and changed the world in a way that emperors and kings with all their might had never managed.

Their locomotive Rocket was not the first in the world, but in terms of transport technology it was the turning point that provides the essential link between the Industrial Revolution and the modern world of today. Together with I.K. Brunel, George and Robert Stephenson were the towering giants of British – and world – engineering in the nineteenth century, inspiring generations in the years since.

In Halsgrove’s pocket-sized hardback series of great lives, renowned railway specialist Robin Jones re-tells the story of the Stephensons – Father George whose entire family at his birth lived in one room in an obscure Northumberland village, and son Robert who left a fortune at his death and is buried in Westminster Abbey – who rose from the humblest of beginnings to dominate the engineering landscape and to become true heroes of Victorian Britain.

A graduate of the University of Central England, Robin Jones, founding editor of Heritage Railway magazine, was a news editor and chief investigative reporter at the Birmingham Evening Mail, and over the years has produced several books and special publications, along with historical features for numerous other newspapers and periodicals. He has been interested in railways from a very early age, when his elder brother Stewart took him trainspotting at Widney Manor station in Solihull at the age of four, at the end of the British Railways steam age.

Imprint: PiXZ Books. ISBN 978 0 85710 057 3, hardback, 110x155mm, 64 pages. Published July 2011.