A CHANCE find at a car boot sale led yesterday to the official unveiling of a £400,000 replica of a piece of railway history.

Beamish Museum took delivery of the 1815 Steam Elephant - a coal steam engine which pre-dates the first passenger locomotive by ten years.

Today, the first passengers will be able to ride on the replica monster, but keeper of industry Jim Rees remembered the moment five years ago when the project got under way.

"John Gall, our deputy director, walked in with these pictures he'd picked up from a car boot sale in Chester-le-Street," he said.

"It was an old unidentified picture of this engine, obviously early 19th Century. He asked if I had any idea what it was and I said I did, but that the story of this engine was one of the great mysteries of our heritage.

"I told him it was called the Steam Elephant and John told me to do something with it. I said 'what?' and he said, in his growling voice, 'I want you to build the thing,' before leaving the room."

Over the next few years, the research team uncovered a number of paintings and drawings of the Steam Elephant, which was built in 1815 by William Chapman of Newcastle, for Wallsend Colliery, and disappeared without trace in the 1840s.

The picture, which may be the first of a locomotive, is also unique, as no confirmed contemporary pictures of other prototype engines, including George Stephenson's Locomotion, exist.

Eventually, Mr Rees and the team felt able to design and build the Steam Elephant using money from the European Union, the Locomotion Trust, The Ken Hoole Trust and Beamish Museum's own funds