Factory town steam locomotive full#

We’re inclined to agree with his conclusion that the machines were made to run rather than gather dust in a museum, and there is no harm in a majorly-restored or even replica locomotive. The film should provoke some thought and debate among rail enthusiasts, and no doubt among Hackaday readers too. We wrote a year or two ago about the world’s first preserved railway, the Welsh Tal-y-Llyn narrow gauge line, and as an example the surprise in the video below is just how little original metal was left in its two earliest locomotives after their rebuilding in the 1950s. Sometimes you do so using new parts because the originals are either unavailable or downright awful, but as you do so are you really restoring the item or creating a composite fake without the soul of the original? It’s a question the railway film and documentary maker considers with respect to steam locomotives, and as a topic for debate we think it has an interest to a much wider community concerned with older tech.Īlong the way the film serves as a fascinating insight for the non railway cognoscenti into the overhaul schedule for a working steam locomotive, for which the mainline railways had huge workshops but which presents a much more significant challenge to a small preserved railway. Many Hackaday readers have an interest in older technologies, and from antique motorcycles to tube radios to retrocomputers, you own, conserve and restore them. Thanks for the tip, ! Posted in Misc Hacks, Transportation Hacks Tagged demolition derby, steam engine, steam locomotive, the Crash at Crush, train, trainwreck Train totalings nevertheless continued until the Great Depression of the 1930s, when the practice was discarded as wasteful. Several people were injured, a few died, and a hired photographer lost an eye to shrapnel. They hit each other going 50 mph (80 km/h) and both engines exploded, sending hot iron projectiles every which way. On September 15th, 1896, forty thousand people gathered to watch two trains collide along a section of purpose-built track. He stood up a temporary town complete with a circus tent restaurant, a wooden jail cell, and 200 rent-a-constables. Once he got the okay, Crush found a large field surrounded by three hills that made for excellent viewing. The largest and most widely-publicized wreck was put on by a man named William George Crush who was trying to find new ways to promote the Missouri-Kansas-Texas passenger railway. A demolition derby seems like child’s play by comparison. Imagine being one of the brave engineers who had no choice but to get the train going as fast as possible and then jump out at the last second. Maybe it wasn’t the safest way to spend an evening, but a staged train wreck was surely an awesome spectacle to behold. And their boss said capital idea, let’s do it.

Factory town steam locomotive full#

That’s right, somebody had the idea to take a couple of worn-out train engines that were ready for the scrap heap, point them at each other, and drive them full steam ahead. Before there were demolition derbies, there were train totalings.