Gator Aid

Logging in the wilds of North America has produced some of the strangest steam machines I’ve ever come across. Take, for instance, the alligator boat. This is an alligator boat:

As you can see, it’s basically a low-hulled paddle steamer, a sort of tugboat. Alligator boats were used on rivers, lakes and ponds in Canada for hauling floats of logs, invented by a company called West and Peachey in approximately 1889. Like all side-wheeled paddleboats, they were highly manoeuvrable. In fact, they were even more manoeuvrable than your average paddleboat. For a start, they could do this:

Yes, they could actually travel on land. You see, the boat might be needed on more than one pond, and so to enable them to get from one to another, they were equipped with powerful winches. Anchored to something suitably solid, the boat would use this winch to haul itself across the ground. This, as I’m sure you’ve figured out, is how they came to be known as “alligators.”

The boats were eventually made obsolete by diesel-powered warping tugs, and by the 1940s they were in definite decline. Most were simply beached and left to rot away. Fortunately for historians and fans of strange machinery alike, there is one survivor – the W. D. Stalker in Simcoe, Ontario.

Source:
http://www.norfolkcounty.ca/living/heritage-culture/alligator-tug/

On balance…

The Listowel and Ballybunion Railway opened in County Kerry in Ireland in 1888 and closed in 1924. It was steam-hauled and, as you might imagine if you know the area, largely rural. Nothing particularly unusual about it.

Oh, except it looked like this.

The Listowel and Ballybunion, you see, was a rare example of a Lartigue monorail. M. Charles Lartigue was inspired by seeing camels carrying loads in panniers and thought, “I know, that’s the perfect basis for a railway.” Basically, in the Algerian desert, it was difficult to build railways due to the problems of loose sand and uneven ground. Lartigue’s monorail elevated the line above the ground, keeping it clear and level.

Monorails are theoretically cheaper than regular railways, hence the interest in replicating the concept in Kerry, an area not noted for its desert landscape. In so doing, the L&BR gave Ireland its first three-wheeled locomotives.

In practice, the idea had a few drawbacks. One was the problem of balance. At best, the ride might be described as “wobbly.” As you can see, each locomotive had two boilers to keep it stable. Similarly, great care had to be taken when loading the carriages and wagons to ensure the load was even – as the late film historian John Huntley put it, “A fat lady was often balanced by a farmer and two pigs.”

The other problem was that the track was raised off the ground, turning it into a barrier wherever it went. Instead of level crossings, therefore, roads had to cross the line by means of drawbridges. A novel solution to getting passengers across the line was to build special wagons that I can only call “footbridge cars.” Literally, wagons that held stairs over the line.

Incredibly, a section of this line has been rebuilt with a (sadly diesel-powered) replica train. The link is below. Go see them if you’re in the area.

Sources
http://www.monorails.org/tmspages/listowel.html
http://irishwaterwayshistory.com/about/miscellaneous-articles/the-lartigue-monorail-in-listowel/
http://www.lartiguemonorail.com/ – The reconstruction.

The London Steam Carriage

Richard Trevithick is most famous as the inventor of the steam locomotive. But this invention of his is, I think, equally worthy of note for the steampunk enthusiast:

This was the 1803 London Steam Carriage. It wasn’t the first steam carriage – Nicholas-Joseph Cugnot had invented one before and James Watt had previously held a patent for such a device. It wasn’t even the first that Richard Trevithick had built. He had built an earlier carriage, with the brilliant but perhaps commercially unwise name of “Puffing Devil” in Camborne, Cornwall. Despite its success, was destroyed when Trevithick and his mates decided to have a few pints in celebration and, left unattended, the Devil set fire to its shed.

Undeterred, Trevithick reworked his ideas and built his next steam carriage in Leather Lane, Clerkenwell, in the City of London. Incidentally, Hiram Maxim also made his first machine guns on this street, and the area is now a rather good market if you’re around there.

The carriage was tried out in London between Clerkenwell and Paddington. Though it managed a speed of ten miles per hour, it wasn’t especially attractive to investors. Not least because it crashed. The only money Trevithick really made from the thing was by selling the engine to a factory.

The machine had a rather Heath Robinson (or Rube Goldberg, if you’re in the USA) look to it, with its stagecoach body mounted atop the huge wheels of the mechanism and that tiny little steering wheel at the front. A modern replica, which you can see in the links below, gives you some idea of what it must have been like in operation. That is to say, even more precarious than it looks in the photograph above, and frankly I wonder the whole thing doesn’t fall over every time it goes around a corner.

Sources

http://www.steamcar.net/brogden-1.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/London_Steam_Carriage

The engine that pushes itself

I always think the early days of a new technology are the most interesting. That’s when the radical new ideas get tried out and concepts evolve. The early days of steam railways were no exception. Take a butcher’s at this.

This is Brunton’s ‘Mechanical Traveller’ or ‘Steam Horse.’ Those things at the back there are legs. Yes, this thing literally operated by pushing itself along. You see, in those days, there was a great deal of scepticism about the idea of iron wheels on iron rails having sufficient adhesion for heavy loads. The fear was that the lack of friction would cause any decent-sized locomotive on the mildest of slopes to come to a standstill with spinning wheels. In fact, not only was this not a problem, but in terms of hauling loads a railway locomotive can pull far more than a road engine of equivalent power. But I digress.

Brunton’s idea would appear to have been successful, but as a technology it was a bit of a dead end, particularly as William Hedley had already proven that there were less Wallace-and-Gromit ways to overcome problems of slippage (namely, link the wheels together). A boiler explosion in 1815 put paid to Brunton’s concept for good.

Can you dig it?

Check this out.

Steam shovels are one of the steampunkest kinds of machine around. The steam shovel, or “steam navvy” if you’re British, was basically the first mechanical digger. They first appeared in the 1830s and remained in production until the 1930s, with the last working examples believed to have gone out of service in the 1960s. They were ubiquitous heavy plant machinery, used in construction, quarrying and mining in their various forms.

They were an American invention, devised by the young engineer William Otis in 1836 and patented in 1839, arising from the unprecedented need for heavy earthworks created by railway building. It’s this model that you see above.

I suspect steam shovels are going to come up a lot on this blog, so I’ll just give you the basics here as they relate to this early machine.

First of all, although the quintessential steampunk material is iron (with huge rivets), Otis’ shovel was mostly made of wood, with iron only used for mechanical parts and reinforcement. The wood-burning steam engine did the hardest part of the job, namely raising and lowering the bucket and moving the machine itself. On that first machine, manpower was needed to move the jib from side to side and to empty the full bucket, though in later versions the steam engine would also cover this.

In those days before the caterpillar track was invented, the best way to prevent this heavy fellow from sinking into the muddy ground was to mount it on temporary rails. One of the improvements to the Otis design was to set the wheels 4′ 8 1/2″ inches apart, the standard gauge for railways, which meant that it could be transported to site by coupling it up to a train.

With this and many other refinements, Otis’ invention was an outstanding success and, as it was the ancestor of so much of our modern plant machinery, Otis really deserved to get rich from his invention. No doubt he would have done, had he not contracted typhoid a short while after receiving his patent. He was only 26 at the time of his death, and who knows what else he might have achieved had he lived?

Sources

http://www.watercrunch.com/2009/02/young-william-otis-moved-earth.html

Manktelow, Peter, Steam Shovels, Shire Publications, UK 2001. ISBN: 0-7478-0483-4