page_title: William Reynolds (industrialist)
section_title: Visiting engineers
hierarchical_section_title: William Reynolds (industrialist) / Innovations / Visiting engineers
caption_attribution_description: photographed by Dr Peter R Lewis in 2005
context_page_description: William Reynolds was an ironmaster and a partner in the ironworks in Coalbrookdale in Shropshire, England. He was interested in advances in science and industry, and invented the inclined plane for canals.
context_section_description: During this period, the reputation of Coalbrookdale encouraged visiting engineers who tried new ideas.
  Thomas Telford knew the Coalbrookdale company since he had become Surveyor of Public Works for Shropshire in 1787. Reynolds constructed Longdon-on-Tern Aqueduct for Telford, a cast-iron aqueduct, assembled in 1796, carrying the Shrewsbury Canal across the River Tern at Longdon-on-Tern. (Telford, encouraged by  its success, used cast iron for the Pontcysyllte Aqueduct).
  In January 1802 Richard Trevithick came to Coalbrookdale, where boiler plates for steam engines had been made for some time. He built and tested a stationary engine which operated with an unprecedentedly high boiler pressure of 145 psi. Trevithick, who had built a road locomotive in Cornwall (the Puffing Devil), then worked, probably with Reynolds, to build a locomotive at Coalbrookdale that ran on rails; few details are known about this experiment, which is thought to be the first occasion of a locomotive on rails.
caption: The cast-iron Longdon-on-Tern Aqueduct
exif: {}