PAPERS have been handed to a railway museum revealing the personal tragedies and triumphs of a North-East railway pioneer.

The great great grandson of Timothy Hackworth has given York’s National Railway Museum a bundle of documents and letters detailing the personal life of the railway engineer from Shildon, County Durham.

Timothy Hackworth was an early railway pioneer who worked for the Stockton and Darlington Railway Company and had his own engineering works in Shildon, where he also lived.

He made and designed locomotives and other engines and worked with significant railway figures of the time, including George Stephenson.

The latest papers include correspondence with  Stephenson in the 1820s and letters which describe the personal lives of his family, including arrangements for putting one of his daughters in an asylum and a letter from a fiancé calling off her wedding to his son, John Wesley Hackworth.

The national museum already has an extensive archive on Hackworth, made up of more than 1,000 letters and documents.

It includes a letter that can be interpreted as evidence Hackworth invented the blast pipe, which helped make Stephenson’s locomotives so successful. Most of the documents were acquired between 2002 and 2010.

Timothy Hackworth had three sons, one of whom died in infancy, and six daughters. The eldest son, John Wesley Hackworth carried on the business after his father’s death. Timothy Hackworth became an engineer on the Darlington and Stockton Railway in 1825.

He left a few years later to concentrate on his own engineering business supplying locomotive and stationary engines build at his workshops where locomotives, marine and industrial engines and boilers were built.

The museum has described the latest documents as playing out like a “modern period drama” when pieced together, as they demonstrate the highs and lows of the Hackworth family.

They have described it as a key collection for anyone interested in the early history of the locomotive and 19th century family life.