author
Francis Trevithick
1812–1877
Part of one of Britain’s great engineering families, this railway pioneer helped shape locomotive practice in the early Victorian era and later wrote an important life of his father, Richard Trevithick.
1 Audiobook
Life of Richard Trevithick, with an Account of His Inventions. Volume 2 (of 2)
by Francis Trevithick
About the author
Born in Camborne, Cornwall, in 1812, he was the eldest surviving son of the inventor Richard Trevithick and Jane Harvey. He trained as an engineer and was working with the Grand Junction Railway by the early 1840s, building a career at the moment railways were rapidly expanding across Britain.
He became one of the early locomotive engineers of the London and North Western Railway, serving as Locomotive Superintendent of its Northern Division at Crewe. His name is especially linked with the "Crewe type" passenger engines, which helped establish Crewe as a major center of locomotive building.
He is also remembered as the author of Life of Richard Trevithick, with an Account of His Inventions (1872), a major source on his father’s work and on the early history of steam engineering. He died in 1877, leaving a legacy both as a practical railway engineer and as a recorder of one of the most inventive periods in industrial history.