price of 4,500 Gulden. Negotiations with Holmes and Rolandson stalled, and this avenue of enquiry was dropped. A further bid came from Josef Reaullaux located in Eschweiler, near Aachen. At the end of April, Platner and Mainberger from Nuremberg were in Neuwied near Cologne. There they wanted to award a contract for the railway track. On 28 April they travelled to Cologne to meet with a friend of Platner called Consul Bartls. Bartls told them about the Belgian engineering works of Cockerill in Liège. As a result, Platner and Mainberger travelled to Liège. There they discovered that Cockerill had not yet built a locomotive, though they did find Stephenson was in Brussels at that time. They reached Brussels on 1 May and stayed in a guesthouse in Flanders, where Stephenson and several of his engineers were staying. Stephenson wanted to be present at the opening of the railway line from Brussels to Mechelen which was scheduled for 5 May. On 3 May, both parties signed a letter of intent. Stephenson wanted to deliver a locomotive of the Patentee type with six wheels and a weight of about six metric tons for a price of between £750 and £800. On 15 May 1835 the new locomotive was ordered from Stephenson's locomotive works in Newcastle upon Tyne to those specifications. Furthermore, a tender for a bogie passenger coach and a goods wagon were ordered. Later it turned out that the locomotive would cost about £900 instead of the sum quoted in Brussels. Stephenson originally promised in Brussels that the locomotive would be delivered by the end of July to Rotterdam Different units of measurement were used in Nuremberg and England; the English foot and the Bavarian foot were different. The track gauge was predefined to be the same as that of the Stockton and Darlington Railway which was . Stephenson persisted with this gauge which meant the existing track had to be relaid, because its track gauge was too narrow by inches. The delivery of the locomotive to Nuremberg, together with all its spares comprising over 100 individual components in 19 boxes with a total weight of 177 hundredweight, came to a cost of £1,140/19/3. The boxes were shipped late, on 3 September 1835, on the ship Zoar from London to Rotterdam. The freight rate from Rotterdam to Cologne was 700 francs, from Cologne to Offenbach am Main 507 South German gulden