Friday, December 6, 2013

Because It's Friday

A replica of Richard Trevithick's 1802 Coalbrookedale locomotive


I wish the photographer had shot some footage of the right side. As you can see, with one cylinder, the locomotive has dead spots that require an operator to manually turn the large flywheel.

Still, the cylinder exhausts into a blastpipe in the stack to increase the draft of the firebox. Every steam locomotive made since then, until the Chinese stopped building them in 1999, descended from the Coalbrookdale locomotive.

4 comments:

  1. Stewart Dean12/06/2013 6:21 PM

    Notice that it has a narrower gauge and there is but a short section of double track with this crittur running on the inside rails. Any idea what all the piping is about alongside the rails?

    ReplyDelete
  2. Interesting how 'big' the dead stroke is...

    ReplyDelete
  3. I would think the piping on the left is for filling or draining an entire train of tanker cars simultaneously.

    A question, on a normal steam locomotive are the cylinders timed to each other so that one is in the mid-point of the power stroke when the other is at the end of it?

    Al_in_Ottawa

    ReplyDelete
  4. Al, On a steam locomotive, the axles are solid and the wheels are fixed to them. Yes, they are set so that the power strokes for the left and right engines are 90 degrees offset.

    Except in three cylinder locomotives, of course, which the engines are set 60 degrees off.

    ReplyDelete

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