In 1804 the first steam train set out on a nine mile journey. Within 50 years, there were 6,000 miles of railway across the country. Discover who was behind this revolution and how it transformed Victorian England.

Sapphire/Band 16 books offer longer reads to develop children's sustained engagement with texts and are more complex syntactically.

Text type: an information book.

Curriculum links: history, geography

Ideas for reading at the back of the book provide practical support and stimulating activities.

This book is part of a book series called Collins Big Cat .

This book has been graded for interest at 9-10 years. This book is part of a reading scheme, meaning that it is a book aimed at children who are learning to read. This reading book uses the phonics method. This approach concentrates on teaching children how to map between sounds and spellings, allowing them to decode written words into their constituent sounds. Phonics skill thus involves being able to split the written word 'cat' into the phonemes /k/, /a/, /t/, and to map from letter 'c' to phoneme /k/, from letter 'a' to phoneme /ae/ and from letter 't' to phoneme /t/. Decoding skill is useful when reading unfamiliar words which use regular spelling sequences.

There are 56 pages in this book. This book was published 2016 by HarperCollins Publishers .

Jo Nelson is an editor and writer from the UK. She has written non-fiction titles across avariety of genres including science, history and biography. Richard Wilkinson is a UK based illustrator who has worked for many well-known clientsincluding the New Scientist. Collins UK has been publishing educational and informative books for almost 200 years.