Blackett set up a four-man working group including himself, William Hedley, the viewer; Timothy Hackworth, the new foreman smith and Jonathan Forster, a "wright".

In 1811, the four-man team began investigating the adhesive properties of smooth wheels using a manually operated carriage propelled by a maximum of four men, and in the same year a single-cylinder locomotive devised by one Waters, reportedly on the Richard Trevithick model, was built and tried for a few months with erratic results.

However even Blackett's new cast iron plateway was found inadequate to sustain the weight of a dilly and the subsequent one built in 1813 was carried on two four-wheeled "power bogies" and it is understood that the first one was similarly rebuilt.

Although William Hedley is generally credited with the "design" of the locomotives, there is strong evidence that these issued from the aforementioned joint collaboration in which Christopher Blackett was the driving force with Timothy Hackworth playing a preponderant engineering role.

Three more of the same type (Hope, Black Diamond, Diligence) were delivered in the following months and difficulties in getting them into operating order were such as to risk compromising the use of steam locomotives for years to come, had it not been for Hackworth's persistence.

Since Trevithick's time, it had long been common practice to turn the exhaust steam from the cylinders into the chimney using "eductor pipes" for convenience and noise reduction, and its effect on the fire certainly had been noticed.

[7] Whatever the case, Hackworth was probably the first engineer in history to fully take into account the role of the blast in automatically realising the "perfect equilibrium between steam production and usage"[8] in a locomotive when fitted with a firetube boiler, and to consider the blastpipe as a distinct device, paying close attention to its proportions, nozzle size, positioning and precise alignment.

However, all locomotives built to date, including those for the Stockton and Darlington, had been intended for slow freight, with any passenger service handled by single horse-drawn coaches.

Matters were further complicated by the news about the problems being encountered on the Stockton and Darlington, which gave rise to considerable controversy as to the sort of motive power to be preferred.

George Stephenson, the line's civil engineer, was unsurprisingly firmly in favour of steam traction and asked for a report from Timothy Hackworth, who confirmed that he was having difficulties but was optimistic about overcoming them.

As Ahrons[9] points out, the vertical cylinders would have given rise to considerable hammer blow at speed and made it unsuited to passenger service on the track of that time in the long term.

However, the Rainhill trials may be seen as a milestone event, as during the eight days it lasted there were considerable modifications carried out on the three main contestants in which Hackworth participated tirelessly and displayed absolute impartiality.

Notably, he built at Shildon in 1836, the first locomotive to run in Russia for the Tsarskoye Selo Railway, of which his son was responsible for the safe delivery and preliminary trials.