The replica should be put back in steam. currently the original rocket sits next to it at shildon, whilst a replica rocket runs demo trains outside.... The sans pareil replica sits there gathering dust, dwarfed out of notice by the enormous lms black five next to it.

Inferior to rocket in most respects as we know nowadays. back then folks didn't. Sans pareil was the culmination of existing tried and tested technology, rocket was revolutionary. Thing was, had it not broken down it very possibly could've won.

@@christopherhogg8364 But like we say in racing: In order to win a race you first need to finish. A highly tuned car might be very fast but there's always the risk of this being the very factor which makes it break down before finish. I'm no expert in steam engines but my guess is that Sans Pareil was the tuned sports car tasked to pull a heavy load while Rocket was the turbodiesel truck which actually could do that all day long.

@@McLarenMercedes other way round. Sans pareil was built along the lines of the first successful freight locomotives, and entered into a contest for a passenger express locomotive. It had many shortcomings as a result but if it's build quality/finish was better and it finished the trial it is very possible it could have outperformed rocket, rather like the first gloster meteors were outperformed by the latest tempests and spitfires. Sans pareil was a zenith of known technology that couldn't really be improved upon, and it was entered into a trial it arguably wasn't suited for. With its high c of g and mechanical arrangement it must've been terrifying at high speed, it's boiler was also probably not really capable of maintaining enough steam. But it failed because of build quality issues outside of hackworths control. He had many advantages over the Stephenson's - he had experience and was the only man thus far to make a reliable, commercially successful locomotive, he had a very experienced driver of this type of engine (iirc one part of the trials not too well known was that sans pareil was being "turned around" at the end of its runs much faster than rocket) the Stephenson's didn't hold all the cards, but hackworth had very little money, less time and didn't have the equipment to manufacture components himself so he had to contract it out - the construction of the boiler was reputedly a total shambles, the cracked cylinder probably just bad luck that could have been spotted and rectified had the time been available to properly test her - but above all else he was an employed man, existing in a bubble, developing locomotives to solve a very specific problem. Stephenson had a much broader knowledge and social circle... All being said, the right engine definitely won (and would still have been the template for future development in any case - hackworth himself was building engines to that basic form not long after) but strangely the type sans pareil was based on continued to be built and run on the s&Dr network with great success for decades after.

probably late 1970s

These replica's built for the 150 year anniversary of rainhill iirc. So 1978.