George Stephenson was the engineer of our local stretch of the Manchester and Leeds Railway (1840), so he deserves a walk-on part in my Redbox Gallery show. Perhaps that should be a swagger-on part because, not surprisingly as the designer of the Locomotion, he was proud of his achievements and perhaps a bit too keen to keep telling people about them.
This quote from The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography gives a good impression of what it would have been like to meet him:
To the end of his life he remained an inveterate and dogmatic deliverer of advice, often while waiting at railway stations telling engineers how to improve the efficiency of their locomotives, and demonstrating to labourers the most effective way to use a shovel and barrow.
The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography