Well, before I start, Mr Stephenson, may I commend you on the elocution lessons you've clearly been taking - I remember when you were first trying to get that "railway" of yours started you found it hard to get anyone to take you seriously! I'm sure you don't want to be reminded of the time that opponents to your railway scheme made you look a fool in Parliament, just because of your Geordie accent.

Anyway, you and your engineer friends know better than I the nuts and bolts of what made Rocket such a revolutionary locomotive, but the chaps at Wikipedia have prepared a nice summary for ignoramuses like me. Pray, any engineers reading this, do apprise me of any incorrectness in the information presented there. Perhaps the most salient fact though, is that it was not a single revolutionary breakthrough, but rather the result of a number of strands of development. This one can also say about the railway system which you so famously perfected with the opening of the Liverpool & Manchester Railway in 1830.

After all, the idea of putting large buckets on wheels and rolling them along tracks has been known for centuries, and you will have been intimately familiar with the wooden "waggonways" constructed around your local area to transport coal from the mines down to the docks.

Thomas Newcomen and James Watt developed static steam engines which you'd have seen driving conveyor belts on farms and pumping water out and air into the mines too. Richard Trevithick put it on wheels but couldn't ever make it seem more than a novelty - perhaps a more serious name than Catch Me If You Can would have helped there.

Indeed, you were not even the first person to put a mobile steam engine in front of a row of wagons on a track and use it to move things around - there were plenty of little railways around collieries and iron works even before your Stockton & Darlington Railway opened in 1826. That was the first railway that the public could use though, which turned out to be quite the popular innovation. Although you mainly intended it to be used to transport coal, I think everyone was surprised at the number of people willing to sit in dirty coal trucks, just to move around in this innovative form of transport.

The glorious Industrial Revolution was of course well underway by the time that the great port of Liverpool and great manufacturing city of Manchester expressed an interest in being linked by railway. Again they had thought mainly of a means of transporting raw materials and finished goods 'twixt the two cities, but it was already known that many passengers would also wish to travel.

With such a busy railway envisaged, there was no way it could be run along the same lines as your Stockton & Darlington which operated more as a turnpike road or canal, with travellers paying a toll to bring their own conveyances (mostly horse-drawn) along the line in addition to the steam trains run by your own company. Instead, the Liverpool and Manchester was to be operated solely by the company, with two tracks laid side-by-side to remove the need for backing up to passing places. There was even a crude system of signalling to avoid trains colliding. We laugh in horror now at its simplicity and unsatisfactory safety record, but it is as well to remember that you and your engineers had to invent every aspect from first principles.

I need hardly remind you of the clamour in the nation that greeted that railway, and its resounding success both operationally and - more importantly - financially. Such a profit did it turn that for a while it seemed that any investment in any railway enterprise must needs be a sound one, and lines began springing up all over the Kingdom.

On one of these lines - a tricky route through the North York Moors inland from Whitby - in 1836, you met a York draper named George Hudson who had inherited a small fortune and invested in the line. He proved to be a most cunning and able businessman, and as more and more railways began springing up, his empire began to grow. Some were poorly planned or badly run and these he attempted to turn around, else he closed them and used the resources elsewhere. Others he commissioned you to build, and you formed a most successful partnership. Hudson entered politics as a way of furthering his business, and was Lord Mayor of York as well as winning election to Parliament for the seat of Sunderland.

Alas, that which seems to good to be true, often proves so, and Mr Hudson, at the peak of his fame as "the Railway King" was proven to be a most dishonest character, and disgraced so publicly that it is even said a near-complete statue in his home city of York had its head removed, to be replaced with that of his rival politician George Leeman. (This last detail is mere rumour, but I repeat it here for your amusement, as the statue may be seen proudly bearing the name Leeman in the city to this day).

Of course, the downfall of Hudson coincided with a dramatic financial crash occasioned by this great speculation, the "Railway Mania" that had gripped the country, and many are the tales of woe and misery we have heard of the suffering of those who had invested unwisely or merely unluckily in railway schemes never completed. Indeed, Mr Dickens himself has oft used the plight of these folk as a dramatic device, and a thinly-veil'd version of Mr Hudson may often be seen in his works as a villainous capitalist.

For a time, railways grew in Britain like weeds in a neglected garden, for the government of the day sought neither to make any plan for a well-ordered layout, nor to trim back any undesired growth, but laid its faith in the divine power of the Free Market to amend all. Thus were many hundreds of railway companies formed, some which grew to enormous size and others which remained small and insignificant.

After the chill of the market crash, a new spring awoke in the 1860s and yet more lines came to criss-cross this fair land, while the larger companies continued to expand, to compete to operate the fastest, most luxurious expresses, and to absorb other, smaller lines.

A wise man once said - or will say, perhaps - that there is naught so powerful as an idea whose time has come, and I feel this epithet may be perfectly suited to the development of the railway system.

We have discussed the technical and organisational innovations you oversaw, and the fact that the Industrial Revolution was well underway, producing a need for swift and efficient transport for both goods and people. One must also acknowledge, however reluctantly, the legacy of the grasping Mr Hudson in creating the beginnings of a unified system, and in supporting the creation of the "Railway Clearing House" where the vital if unglamorous work of calculating ticket prices across multiple conpanies' routes could be done, allowing passengers to easily purchase tickets for journeys involving trains belonging to more than one operator.

By the time of the late Prince Albert's "Great Exhibition" of 1852, it is true to say that the nation was "in the railway habit", and this exhibition provided the impetus for so many people to venture onto the rails and visit their capital, many for the first time. If railways before that could be regarded as a mere novelty, a flash-in-the-pan, then after the Exhibition it seemed apparent that they were here to stay.

One should also mention the unique geographical situation of our fair land, its relative compactness compared to the sprawling wastelands of the United States - and its lack of marauding natives too - its long, slender shape lending itself to a system of north-south main lines with connecting services, and its relative political unity and tranquility. One may merely look at the situation obtaining in the Germanies before Prince Bismarck's remarkable unification endeavours to discover why no railway system emerged there.

One should not of course be too dismissive of the efforts of other nations - the United States was quick to adopt the technology and her sad Civil War proved to any doubters the value of the railways for military use. Indeed, the westward expansion of those United States and the connection of the East Coast with the new possessions of California into one nation would not have been possible, just as our dominion of Canada was forged into a single entity by the ties of the iron road.

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I should recommend to you the work of the estimable Mr Christian Wolmar who has written excellently on the subject in his monograph Fire and Steam, from which volume much of the information in the above is gleaned.

Additionally, much other information can be found in a thematic rather than narrative history entitled The Railways: Nation, Network and People by Mr Simon Bradley.

Dear Mr Watt, FRS, FRSE,

The steam engine is a child of science - Papin's engine followed from his work with the great Huygens trying to build an internal combustion engine, and then the practical men such as Newcomen stepped in and took it to industry. However, the science it was birthed from was the science of Huygens, Newton, and Boyle - the science of forces rather than the science of energy. Thermodynamics as we know it today was yet to develop. This is something that you recognised, as we can see from your long labours in unravelling the basic science of steam. Your improvements stemmed from a better understanding of energy than your predecessors had, and you yourself provided much of that understanding from your experiments (and today, we recognise this by naming the SI unit of energy after you). Your great improvement, in making steam engines so much cheaper to run (five times cheaper, if I recall correctly), made steam power affordable to the masses, and enabled it to move away from its first role of pumping water from coal mines. Indeed, this was such an advance that many people today believe that you invented the steam engine, ignoring the work of Papin and Newcomen, and even your earlier experience as a steam engine engineer. Of course, it was that experience that made the need for improvement clear to you, and drove you to your studies. We of today owe not only a large part of the industrial world to you, but also a large part of the science of thermodynamics. Your work as an inventor is widely known today, but your work in fundamental science much less so - you should be better known as one of the first, and perhaps the greatest, of those who married science and technology in the early Industrial Age.

But it was not only your engineering and scientific skills that made your engines such a success. It was also the business and marketing talent of your partner, Matthew Boulton. He nurtured your work on your engine, helping hatch it forth from the patent and grow it into a chugging beast pumping water from mines. The scheme of charging an annual payment based on 1/3 of the amount of coal saved compared to using a conventional engine (i.e., of the Newcomen type) tempted many mine owners - if the engine didn't work much better, then little would it cost them - unhappy though they were with that scheme once they realised just how much they had to pay. Your firm of Boulton and Watt then took your engines away from the mines and into the factories, now that their hunger was small enough for factory owners to sate without losing their profits.

There was, of course, an underlying societal condition: the hunger for more power. Factories were growing, and the power provided by water, wind, and muscle was not enough. The mine owners could benefit from Newcomen's engines by burning their coal of worst quality, unsaleable or barely saleable. But a factory owner would need to buy coal (or, if a mine owner, at least pay to transport the coal), and needed a more efficient engine. Your work cut the cost of steam power by a factor of five, and allowed steam to drive the industrial world.

With warm and thermodynamic regards, Your correspondent from the future, WW.