Constance Bronte was born at Thornton in 1816,the year after the end of the Napoleonic wars.A sickly child, she nevertheless showed great promise at school, excelling particularly at technical drawing and mechanical engineering. At the age of twelve, she had already designed an improved form of piston valve, and when she was sixteen, won a scholarship to Bolton Technical College. While studying there, she built a vacuum brake system, which she patented and sold to the Great Western Railway. Upon her graduation, in 1836,she took up the post of Chief Mechanical Engineer on the London and North Western Railway at Horwich locomotive works.

Constance Bronte's time at Horwich was a happy and productive one. She immediately set about designing a hydrostatic lubricator for supplying oil to the piston and valve rings on the Horwich fleet of ageing locomotives. It was an enormous triumph,and, flushed with success, Constance straightaway went on to her next project which was the high temperature superheating of steam. Whilst engaged in this work, she was involved in a tragic incident on the footplate of a locomotive being tested behind the carriage sheds at Crewe. A high pressure tube in the boiler collapsed and the resulting explosion killed three clerks and burned off all Constance's hair. Never regaining it, she had to wear a toupee and a hat for the rest of her life.

Drawing equipment and lubricant possibly used by Constance A.K.A. Isabel Kingdom Bronte - Engineer and confectioner.	An early Haworth Pastor.

So highly was Constance Bronte regarded by the directors of the LNWR, that she was given her very own siding in which to relax during her off-duty moments, and she could often be found there, shunting old wagons by hand and puffing on her pipe. She used to smoke a particularly vile-smelllng brand of tobacco, and complaints were often received at the railway company's head office from irate housewives in the neighbourhood, because their washing used to reek of sulphur and burnt feathers. However, so esteemed was Constance at headquarters, that the company would write back giving the cause as smoke from low-grade coal used by shunting engines.

In 1846 a need arose for a larger, more powerful, class of engines to haul the heavy soap trains from Port Sunlight, and Constance was empowered by the directors of the LNWR to design them. She relished the prospect, and set to work with a will. These engines were going to be the biggest, strongest and most powerful ever seen in Britain.

It was at this time she took the pseudonym 'Isabel Kingdom' Bronte due to her almost identical likeness (in a stove-pipe hat) to the now world renowned engineer and pastry chef.

The prototype of the "Impediment" class emerged from Horwich works early in 1847. Named "Feculent", it was massive. Measuring 94 feet from buffer to buffer, weighing over 202 tons without tender, this eight cylindered monster had wheels over 11 feet in diameter, of a 4-12-4 arrangement.
Unfortunately,things went badly wrong on the test run. Gaining the main line at Blackrod, "Feculent" proceeded north. Rapidly gaining speed, she hurtled through Adlington, demolishing the signal box as she passed. All the over bridges through which "Feculent" travelled were damaged beyond repair and the steel girders of the Ribble bridge at Penwortham were left buckled and warped. Signal posts were snapped like matchsticks along the route and lineside structures flattened. Just after Preston station (where the platform edges were torn up, and the ornate glass canopy brought crashing down) the crew realised that something might be amiss. However, before "Feculent" could be restrained, the portals of Woodplumpton tunnel loomed through the cab windows. The crew leapt from the footplate. With a sickening crash,"Feculent" wedged herself firmly in the entrance and exploded. The thunderous roar was later said to have been heard as far away as Macclesfield. The "Impediment" class of locomotive was abandoned. (In the official history of the LNWR, the reason given was "loading gauge difficulties".)

It was a chastened Constance Bronte who,in 1847,joined the footplate link at Chorley as a Fireman. She enjoyed the work, however, and soon rose through the ranks to become an engine-driver on expresses.
It was whilst Constance was sketching a new design of connecting rod, on the footplate one day in June 1856, that her engine ran at sixty eight miles an hour into the buffer stops at Manchester Victoria and she was killed outright.