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WELCOME
Think about your most memorable train journey. Who were you with? Where were you going? What was at stake? Maybe it was travelling to a new job, or visiting someone in hospital, or heading home after years away. Hold that memory.
Now realise this: The rails you travelled on are almost certainly standard gauge - 4 feet 8½ inches. That measurement has a remarkable history.
The Stockton & Darlington Railway used 4 feet 8 inches - an ancient measurement for wagons and carriages going back to Greek and Roman times, based on the width of two horses tethered side by side. But once the railway was running, they discovered something: with the increased speed the wagons needed ever so slightly more room to prevent derailment. So they added half an inch.
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That pragmatic adjustment - learned through experience on the S&DR - became Stephenson Gauge. And Stephenson Gauge became Standard Gauge. Your train journey two centuries later runs on a measurement that connects ancient Roman roads to modern railways, with the crucial half-inch discovered right here on Teesside.
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But here's the really staggering part: The railway didn't just replace the horse. It didn't make things twice as fast. Over the following decades, it made land travel eight times faster and opened up ranges eight times greater than anything humanity had ever achieved before. This wasn't incremental change. This was a rupture. A transformation.
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And your ancestors - wherever they lived - experienced that rupture. There was a day when the railway reached their town and everything changed. The world they knew in the morning was gone by evening.
Waggonway: The Iron Horse explores that moment through one fictional family caught in it. The Drewkirk family are caught up in the changes. But a family secret threatens to destroy them on opening day: September 27, 1825.
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This isn't just a historical story. It's a mirror for our own moment of rupture. The questions they faced are our questions now.
My Story
I was born in Leeds (I know, I know - but I did my time on Teesside where this story actually happened, so surely that counts for something).
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Nearly ten years ago, I was on a train from King's Cross when a fellow passenger made a passing comment - about a coastal hotel connected to the early railways. It was nothing, really. But it lodged in my brain. And when I started pulling at that thread, I discovered the Stockton & Darlington Railway properly for the first time.
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September 27, 1825. The world's first public railway. And somehow I'd lived right on top of this history without ever understanding what it meant.
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The more I researched, the more I realised this wasn't just an engineering story - it was a human story. About families caught in transformation. About how ordinary people survive when everything changes. About secrets and choices and the cost of progress.
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That became the Waggonway series.
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I've self-published Waggonway: The Iron Horse because I wanted to get it into readers' hands directly. Could this become something more - a film, perhaps? The story of how that might happen is woven into the later books. But that's getting ahead of myself.
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What matters now is this: There's a whole world to explore in this history, and I'll try to be your guide as this series unfolds. Not through archaeology or dusty archives, but through places that still stand, stories that still resonate, connections you can make between then and now.
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Because here's the truth: This series fails if you don't want to recommend it to someone else. That's the bar I've set for myself. Stories like this only matter if they're shared. If they make you think differently about train journeys. If they help you see the ruptures of change we're living through now.
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That's what I'm writing toward. Not just a good historical novel, but something that ignites recognition in every reader: This is about how we experience change
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If I can do that, the story will spread the way it needs to. One reader at a time, one recommendation at a time.
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The WAGGONWAY Series
INTENTION
Four books. One revolution. The story no one has told. Think as these of the four sides of a football pitch. Without these being in place it might seem that there isn't a intention, purpose or vision.
THE VISION
Two hundred years ago, the Stockton & Darlington Railway opened and changed everything. You know the engineering triumph. The locomotives. The iron rails. The genius of George Stephenson.
But you don't know the human story.
The Waggonway series follows the families caught in that transformation—across four decades, four locations, and four impossible choices. Guided by Manisha Scott, writing from 2038, these novels explore what the history books missed: how ordinary people survived when their world ruptured.
This is the story of what it cost. What it built. Why it mattered. And where it led.
THE STRUCTURE
The series is intentionally designed. Four books. Four questions. One continuous story.
Book One: The Iron Horse — The WHAT
The Awakening
September 27, 1825. The world's first public railway opens on Teesside. Blacksmith Big John Drewkirk runs the forge with his sister Mags and his two sons, Marty and Denny. Grace Ashcroft has married into the family, and her son Jonny works directly with George Stephenson on Locomotion itself, helping to forge the ironwork that makes the railway possible.
The line begins in County Durham and navigates the River Tees, not following it but crossing it—challenging geography itself. This new transport system doesn't trace old routes. It creates new veins of travel and communication, connecting places that were never connected before.
But the Drewkirk family harbors a devastating secret. And on opening day—with sixty thousand people gathered to witness history—that secret threatens to destroy them.
This is where it begins. The characters. The locations. The moment everything changes.
Book Two: Port Darlington — The HOW
The Explosion
The railway succeeded. Now it demands more. Joseph Pease purchases vast tracts of land on the south bank of the Tees and builds an entirely new town—Port Darlington—to handle deeper ships and greater ambition. Stockton, the original terminus, is bypassed.
The Drewkirks, Peases, and Backhouses navigate this new world where opportunity explodes but old certainties crumble. Success has consequences. Progress leaves casualties.
This is how transformation spreads. How fortunes shift. How families adapt—or don't.
Preorder now. Coming [date].
Book Three: The Railway King — The WHY
The Ambition
Railways spread across Britain. George Hudson, with George Stephenson's engineering genius, becomes the Railway King—beloved by the public, despised by aristocracy. Jonny Drewkirk and Emily Backhouse marry and relocate to York, where they establish the Drewkirk Time Company, creating the station clocks that will define an era.
But Hudson's ambition outpaces sustainability. His downfall is spectacular. And York becomes ground zero for understanding why the railway age exploded—and what happened when ambition met reality.
This is why it mattered. Why it couldn't be stopped. Why some rose and others fell.
Coming [date].
Book Four: The Seaside Town — The WHERE
The Culmination
Henry Pease looks at empty coastline and sees possibility. Saltburn-by-the-Sea is built from nothing—a Victorian resort town designed to bring the wealthy to the sea via railway. Our families age. A new generation is born. Deaths mark the passage of time.
This final book asks the ultimate question: Where did it all lead? What was built with all that transformation? And what legacy did these families leave behind?
This is where the railway took us. Where the story ends. Where Manisha Scott, writing in 2038, finally reveals why these lives matter.
Coming [date].
WHY THESE FOUR BOOKS MATTER
Nowhere else did this happen.
The public railway began on Teesside. Not London. Not Manchester. Here. And last year's bicentennial passed without anyone telling the human story—the families who lived through it, the choices they made, the cost they paid.
The Waggonway series is that missing story.
Four books. Four locations that still exist. Four stages of transformation. And characters who persist across decades, aging, evolving, making impossible choices as their world accelerates beyond recognition.
This is the story of how ordinary people survived extraordinary change.
And two centuries later, as we face our own rupture, their story has never been more urgent.
YOUR GUIDE: MANISHA SCOTT
Every book is narrated by Manisha Scott, writing from 2038. She discovered the Drewkirk family's story through artifacts saved by Michael Nogon in 1970—clocks, journals, fragments of lives lived in the machinery of change.
Manisha is your guide. She knows where the story leads. She knows what we're living through now. And she understands why these nineteenth-century lives matter in the twenty-first century.
She's telling you this story for a reason.
THE JOURNEY
Four books. Read them in order. Experience the complete transformation.
The Iron Horse → Port Darlington → The Railway King → The Seaside Town
WHAT happened → HOW it spread → WHY it mattered → WHERE it led
This is the Waggonway series. The story that's been waiting two hundred years to be told properly.
Start with Book One. The journey begins September 27, 1825.
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