I'm a high-tech electronics person but I still love steam engines (and that's partly historical as my father was a mechanical engineer who worked on building power station boilers and I'm old enough to have traveled on steam trains as a kid when they weren't a novelty).
That said, I'm concerned that the reawakening of interest in steam engines/trains especially in the UK may be the result of a hankering for the old days when Britain had an empire and its mechanical engineering output was the envy of the world. Of course, I hope I'm wrong and that interest actually runs deeper than just that.
What ought to be important about this reawakening is that we have the opportunity to awaken an interest in kids about mechanics, engineering and science and do so from a very young age, and in my opinion, there's nothing much better than having them stand on a platform watching a hissing, noisy steam engine.
Steam engines are visually exciting and interesting but they are also the combined embodiment of mechanics and thermodynamics and understanding both of them is the keyway to understanding science.
Despite my electronics background I consider that a thorough understanding of thermodynamics is crucial to understanding the high-tech world irrespective of one's field. And I reckon there's likely no better way of starting kids' education in thermodynamics other than to have them engulfed in steam from a Puffing Billy.
There is no reawakening. Realistically, interest is slowly declining. Britain has had an extensive steam perservation scene for decades.
It's just that the technology to do relatively affordable one-off designa nd manufacturing of steam locmotive parts that were formerly made in specialist workshops has only recently been feasible. That, and a combination of running out of original locomotives to restore, and worries that eventually the original locomotives will become too difficult to keep running indefinitely, has lead to a growth in new-build projects. There are now a large number in progress.
OK, I have to take your word for that (I'm in Australia and haven't been to the UK for a few years).
But it's certainly not the impression I get over here with the plethora of UK TV programs on steam, for instance: LNER 4472, Nigel Gresley, 4468/Mallard, vintage and current railways/trips and many, many others.
It's almost impossible to go for a few days without seeing Michael Portillo on the box standing on a station platform, in a train carriage or pretentiously shovelling coal into some antique engine. When he's not on Rob Bell is waxing lyrically about the beauty of everything from 4472 to 60163 Tornado, to lighthouses, to railway viaducts; and in beween him and Portillo there's Chris Tarrant's Extreme Railways, Tim Dunn's The Architecture the Railways Built, not to mention Bill Nighy's The World's Most Scenic Railway Journeys and any number of others. It's never-ending.
So what on earth is going on in the UK if interest in engines/railways is waning?
Mind you, I don't mind these programs at all but there are so many of them that they drive some people I know to whinge 'oh hell, not another *** train program!'
Are you really troubled that your country is moving beyond using coal as fuel, which was pretty much mankind's next step after burning wood or dung as fuel?
When coal is burnt to generate electricity or heat homes then no, we have better alternatives.
When it is being used within heritage railways which provider pleasure for so many - see some of the comments on this thread - I feel an exception should be made.
Much coal is still burnt within industrial processes in the UK, cement producers for example. Because this is much less visible and because they are powerful multi-national companies they do not appear to face the same level of scrutiny.
I understand attitudes of younger generations to me. The tide is turning. People will no longer tolerate "polluting for pleasure" and the days of steam railways are numbered. Grab a trip or sight of Tornado whilst you still can!
Correct. I wondered how long it would take the do-gooders to start moaning about steam engines/heritage railways and coal use. These quasi-religious zealots need to be put in their place as they are doing more harm than good for the environment. Unnecessarily alienating people doesn't help.
Emissions from heritage steam trains is hardly measurable in the grand scheme of things.
How viable is it to build (or retrofit) "heritage" steam locomotives with electric boilers? I assume it would be very difficult to run off battery, but maybe draw from the catenary on electrified lines? I know it's not /quite/ the same but I'm curious if this is a road things might go down.
Given the amounts of energy involved and (terrible) thermal efficiency of steam traction it would be impractical. You could short the 25kV overhead wires on an electrified route straight to the boiler and I doubt even that would make sufficient steam to get an express up to speed.
A more practical option would be oil firing, which was tried in the days of steam and found to work, but didn't save enough money to be worth the effort in a country that still had an efficient supply chain for coal. It could be done again now and would doubtless work, but wouldn't smell or look quite the same. Better than nothing I suppose and if coal really does become unavailable, that's what heritage operations will have to do.
There were some small steam locomotives switched to electric firing, as a way to use existing infrastructure during wartime coal shortages. It's questionable if it would scale to the levels you'd want to allow a large main-line engine to run at peak performance.
Yes, they actually run at near main-line speeds in the UK (60-80mph). Riding one of those at that speed (particularly at night) must be an awesome experience.
It’s a bit pedantic, but on a fair chunk of the main lines trains can run at 125mph, so the 75mph limit for steam locomotives (barring Tornado, which can run at 90) isn’t that close. Various “box on wheels” trains like variants of the Turbostar and Desiro can easily outpace them, let alone real intercity trains.
(Cue nostalgia of the heyday of steam, before all these limits where every steam express definitely managed to hit a ton at some point).
Does this matter? There are up and down slow lines and passing loops to accommodate slower trains such as freight and preservation excursions on both the WCML and ECML. Also once you're into Scotland there's very little in the way of 125mph operations. The joy of a steam or historic diesel excursion isn't the speed, it's the being there and enjoying the nostalgia of olde world locomotion and carriages.
Also if you're paying 150-300 GBP for these outings you want the experience to last, not just four hours up the ECML at 125mph and then you're done. I kinda feel people miss the point of this as a thing.
The problem with the speed isn't for the passengers on-board—it's for the rest of the railway.
It's one thing to deal with the operational complexity of relatively slow services when they're freight—which provide a clear commercial and economic benefit—but it's another when it's essentially a luxury service (and I'm well aware plenty of the services aren't really luxurious: but they're certainly too expensive for many, which makes them a luxury).
Their acceleration is relatively poor even compared with many freight services, and when running up the northern ends of the WCML/ECML (both of which are two track railways) the challenges of timetabling _any_ slower services during the day are real.
Well these tour operators do pay for track access and pathing just like other TOC's and the rest of the railway will just need to get on with it.
Also when it comes to rail tours such as this there's at most two tours a day operating and they're very seasonal, and maybe running four or five times a year each. So a couple of these trains a day across the whole network isn't exactly impacting the network that much.
I remember the HST 125 as it was introduced. Go back to 1980. Two small boys (nine and 10) are stood on the east bound GWR platform at Newton Abbot in Devon, waiting for the Paddington train from Penzance. Will we get a sleek futuristic looking 125 or the usual boring diesel loco?
The rails made a clikkety click/clakkety clack or a CAtic/CAtac sound and more besides which sometimes enabled you to know where you were by the sound. You could also estimate speed with your eyes shut. [I could go on ...]
Anyway. 125mph is shit for something that runs on rails. There are quite a few examples of 180mph+ railway systems.
> I remember the HST 125 as it was introduced. Go back to 1980. Two small boys (nine and 10) are stood on the east bound GWR platform at Newton Abbot in Devon, waiting for the Paddington train from Penzance. Will we get a sleek futuristic looking 125 or the usual boring diesel loco?
Yes I know it was but it looked like it ran on rocket fuel. It must have had better exhaust vents too because when the old blunt yellow noses turned up they absolutely stank. The 125 smelled quite a bit too but only as being present rather than stuffing black soot up your nose. I was very young then and I would have been repulsed by anything worse.
Fast forward to today and GWR is a customer and the modern version of the 125 (I forget the Class number - I'm just IT) is still running. I've seen them in bits in Laira (Plymuff) and St Phil's Marsh in Bris'l. The power plant is a bit of a whopper. In the sheds there are dispensers for ear plugs, regularly spaced for quick access. You should try to keep a few in a pocket anyway - ideally all of them! They are quite handy when a technician fires up the motor and decides to run it at max chat.
Back in the day I saw the APT doing trial runs. Nowadays I can take a Pendolino ...
Even at 75mph this stuff is all unsafe and wouldn't be legal if it wasn't essentially a museum on wheels.
A modern multiple-unit is way stronger and built from things which are designed to bend and then once they exceed maximum load, tear into non-sharp pieces, which means when (not if) something goes badly wrong it's much more survivable for the occupants. At 5mph you aren't too bothered, but older coaches would deconstruct into sharp pieces in even a 50mph collision so the accident ends up more lethal than it would be if you weren't inside a vehicle at all.
Years back a cement mixer truck fell off a bridge onto a moving train. It was a modern design, and so even though obviously such a truck is incredibly heavy it just dented the train and the person directly below the impact inside the train survived (with some injuries). With the older carriages used on a heritage railway it would have demolished the entire carriage and turned everybody inside it into paste, the emergency response would have been recovering remains, not rescuing one guy with head injuries and a bunch of scared but otherwise unharmed passengers.
I have done this as a child with my grandparents, but I'm not sure there's that much difference from an old/worn (less smooth) commuter train at a similar speed.
For a child, I think a better experience is visiting a larger preserved railway. I liked visiting the locomotive works at Loughborough (Great Central) since age 8 or so I was shorter than the largest wheels of most locomotives. I'm not sure if it's still the case, but back then we could walk close enough to risk getting grease on our clothes. From Google review photos it looks like it.
(From the article, I'm still shorter! They're over 2m in diameter.)
It's very atmospheric, an absolute joy. But the best part has to be turning up at Victoria in the middle of the evening rush in an 80 year old steam train. The looks on people's faces alone are worth the price :)
Even if you can't get a seat on a mainline trip, there are plenty of lines operating at lower speed that you could just turn up to. Some of the bigger names include the Great Central Railway, Severn Valley Railway, Bluebell Line, North Yorkshire Moors Railway... But there are plenty more across the country. That's one of the positive legacies of the Beeching cuts.
Ha! OP here; I hadn't even noticed that, and I read the article about peppercorn rent earlier. I got to here from a long wikitrail that began at a steam enthusiast friend's Facebook post. But perhaps the link caught my attention due to the previous article.
Yesterday the news broke that the UK branch of the Silicon Valley Bank was purchased by HSBC for £1 under the so called "peppercorn" agreement, which is quite common to see in leasehold properties, business transactions etc.
So not unsurprising that the word has stuck in people's minds and a flurry of interested related articles is posted the next day.
Steam engines are fascinating pieces of technology. The page for the trust itself is full of interesting engineering details: https://www.a1steam.com/.
Btw, some great books on Steam locomotives/engines:
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07NQ9JG2M - American steam locomotives 1880–1960. The author of drove locomotives, and was the transportation curator at the Smithsonian Museum. He wrote it over 30 years, and you can tell the amount of care and detail he put into with the details and history.
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B072BFJB3Z - The Perfectionists: How Precision Engineers Created the Modern World. Talks about how precision engineering was critical to the invention and wider use of steam engines.
That's great. There is also this effort in New Zealand: https://mackwelloco.com/, focusing on "Modern Steam" techniques, with a small engine, targeting areas without easy access to diesel.
what is interesting to me is they are building machinery designed before modern manufacturing methods and material science. Looking through another steam engine revival project they are using modern design methods and likely materials: https://www.a1steam.com/p2monobloc#/
They had an event a few years back (maybe a bit more than a few, 2012) at the NRM where all six surviving A4's were reunited for the 75th anniversary of the Mallard's record speed run, and the had the Bittern [1] doing some high speed runs. ("High Speed" in this case being about 92-93 mph).
Kinda cool. Here in Colorado, a narrow gauge steam engine threw sparks and caused one of the largest forest fires in the State's history a few years back. Steam engine aren't (always) allowed on the line anymore.
I thought they addressed that by converting to oil burners.
It's not just Colorado. When Union Pacific restored 3985, it was initially a coal burner. They lit a lot of grass fires until they converted it to burn oil. (I was uncomfortably close to one of them, and helped put out another one.)
Correct, on high-fire danger days, they run more conventional engines. I mean it's pretty sad in a way, as the train line is more a museum than anything else.
That's absolutely right but boilers aren't the only thing to wear out. With so many moving metal parts, despite an automated lubrication system delivering oil to most of the surfaces even the best designs of steam loco will shake themselves to bits before long. The regular expansion/contraction cycles as it's warmed up for work and cools down after also put a lot of stress on the metal.
Sixty years ago refurbs would be much of the work going on at any large railway works - taking engines apart, stripping them down to the chassis and reassembling almost a new one in their place. The ingenuity today's preservationists demonstrate in doing this without any of the facilities of a plant is truly a thing to behold.
(Source: some of my family restore steam engines. I once tried to drive one and I was terrible.)
> Sixty years ago refurbs would be much of the work going on at any large railway works - taking engines apart, stripping them down to the chassis and reassembling almost a new one in their place.
Here's the process.[1] This had to be done every 120,000 miles or so, which is every 1-2 years. On top of that, there's a few hours a day of routine daily maintenance.[2]
I should have been less terse. I only wanted to point out its 'old news' -but I love steam, and whilst I love prosaic diesel shunters as much, I do love steam.
I wish they'd do something a bit more streamlined like "Mallard"
If all goes well, the new Pennsylvania T1 should be able to beat it. There are stories of the PPR T1's significantly beating Mallard's record, some say over 140 mph, but that the railroad was too busy to officially beat the record.
And the fun discussion in all railway preservation forums is...which is the truly representative Flying Scotsman? It's quite amazing how hostile those debates can get for a loco that in its life of non-preservation use was transformed so many times as an operational steam engine. It's the loco equivalent of The Ship of Theseus.
Me? I don't care. It's a nice thing and I enjoy seeing it in whatever form it may appear as. Personally I like the tender that has a corridor from the first coach through to the engine plate. That seems quite nice for the driver and fireman to have delivered more than just some eggs and bacon cooked on dirty shovel :)
That said, I'm concerned that the reawakening of interest in steam engines/trains especially in the UK may be the result of a hankering for the old days when Britain had an empire and its mechanical engineering output was the envy of the world. Of course, I hope I'm wrong and that interest actually runs deeper than just that.
What ought to be important about this reawakening is that we have the opportunity to awaken an interest in kids about mechanics, engineering and science and do so from a very young age, and in my opinion, there's nothing much better than having them stand on a platform watching a hissing, noisy steam engine.
Steam engines are visually exciting and interesting but they are also the combined embodiment of mechanics and thermodynamics and understanding both of them is the keyway to understanding science.
Despite my electronics background I consider that a thorough understanding of thermodynamics is crucial to understanding the high-tech world irrespective of one's field. And I reckon there's likely no better way of starting kids' education in thermodynamics other than to have them engulfed in steam from a Puffing Billy.