Companies rushed to exploit the potential of the railway, led by energetic engineers and businessmen. Young men like Isambard Kingdom Brunel and his assistant, Daniel Gooch.

Brunel and Gooch worked for the Great Western Railway Company. The GWR had been formed in 1835 to build a railway line linking London and Bristol. This link would cut journey times between the two cities dramatically.

This was a potentially lucrative line - Bristol was then a major port, with key links to America - but the building of it posed a challenge. Bristol and London were 117 miles apart, with hilly ground towards the west. In 1840, steam locomotives needed an overhaul every 60-80 miles and they had to be changed to cope with significant increases in gradient.

Brunel asked Gooch to look for a solution. Gooch suggested solving both the problems in one place: an area of rough ground near a canal junction about a mile from the little town of Swindon.

Here, a station and a maintenance depot could be built, using the canal to transport building materials and fuel. Passengers could rest at the station while their locomotive was changed and the used engine sent for its service.

This solution created new challenges. The GWR would need to employ over 200 people at the site and they and their families would need housing.

Brunel agreed to the idea - but it was already clear that he was taking on something quite new to him: the founding and planning of a town.

Sometime in 1840, Brunel made some rough sketches in his notebooks. One he titled 'works', the other 'village'. This was the birth of a new community created and owned by the GWR: the little town of New Swindon.

There was something of a frontier town atmosphere at New Swindon in the early 1840s. The station and works were alone among Wiltshire fields. The village was under construction and families had to walk through mud from the station to the new cottages. They were mostly young people from the new industrial centres, people with new skills and strange accents, crowded into the tiny cottages; some of which were only half finished.

The town's fortunes were closely linked to those of the company. The GWR's financial difficulties in the late 1840s led to redundancies and a freeze on new developments. Poor drainage and problems with water supply caused persistent health problems that were not solved until the 1880s.

But the pattern for the long-term growth of the town was already set. As early as 1845, it was decided to carry out manufacturing as well as maintenance at New Swindon. From this point on, Swindon was the obvious place to site new GWR engineering facilities.

The GWR's network expanded dramatically. Eventually it covered all of south-west England and much of the west midlands. The works administered and serviced most of this network and each time a major new part of the works was built, another group of employees and their families came to Swindon and the town around the works grew large.

The works doubled in size between 1864 and 1876, under Joseph Armstrong. George Churchward doubled them again around the turn of the century.

Armstrong and Churchward constructed some of the works' largest buildings. They also ensured that the GWR watched over the growing town. They helped to set up a building society to construct housing and introduced levies on wages, from which welfare facilities were funded.

Growth led finally, in 1900 to the uniting of New Swindon, the railway town that had grown up around the works, with Old Swindon, the market town on the hill to the south, into a single borough. The new borough had 45,000 inhabitants, of whom over 10,000 worked in the GWR works - most of the adult males in the town.

At the work's peak, during the 1920s, the GWR had 3,858 locomotives, most made in Swindon, and between them covering in a record year over 97 million miles.

A job at Swindon was a job for life; the heartbeat of the town was the steam-driven whistle of the works' hooter inside the four-mile perimeter of the works. To this day, Swindonians describe the works' site as simply 'inside'.

The Second World War brought the end of the GWR. To aid the war effort, the railway companies were taken under public control. Submarines and gun bases were manufactured alongside locomotives and carriages. In 1948, the Labour government nationalised the entire network, creating British Railways. Rationalisation lessened Swindon's significance and in 1960 the last steam locomotive to be made by British Railways, the Evening Star (pictured left), left the works. Engineering work continued on the site until 1986, when the works finally closed.

Swindon adapted. Transport made the town and transport kept it alive: car manufacture, product distribution, computer services and corporate headquarters are features of the town today, all attracted by its closeness to the M4, to Heathrow and the presence of Brunel's main line to London.