CON'D FROM TRAINS1.TXT
          We find illustrations of early wooden wagonways in
several sixteenth century treatises, of which perhaps the best
known is the De Re Mettalica of Georgius Agricola (George Bauer).
It was published in 1556. Six years before, a mining railway in
Alsace was illustrated by Sebastian Munster in his Cosmographiae
Universalis. Mining railways in western Europe and also in the
Tyrol had probably been in use for some time before these
publications.
          One can only write "probably", noting that as far as we
know the idea of the confined track occurred to some unrecorded
Mesopotamian, and the use of the flanged wheel on plain rail to
some forgotten German, not necessarily in the countries that we 
now call Iraq and Germany. They were called in old German Hunte.
          In the eighteenth century there were two rival systems:
that of the flanged wheel on plain rail - the present form- and
that of the plain wheel on flanged rail, the latter being formed
of L-shaped iron plates extending from stone to stone; a rough
but workable road as long as the loads are not too heavy. In
that century, very extensive mining railways were built in Europe
most notable in south Wales and north east England, where
collieries were booming. In Scotland, too, they had  arrived
sufficiently soon for a battle to be fought over one (at
Prestonpans near Edinburgh in 1745) during the last British
dynastic war. 
           What, may one ask, has all this to do with trains? A
horse pulling a wagon over rails did not make a train. But while
on a common road, that horse could only pull one wagon, on rails
he could pull several. So there is your train. 
          Still, it could not our idea of a train until it had a
propulsive engine of some sort. In the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries there were no engines except for very simple and quite
academic models. What in later years was to be called civil
engineering (that was, not military as in the building of
fortifications) was a much older science than that of mechanical
engineering. The Roman aqueducts built under the Emperor Claudius
were quite"modern".
          In eighteenth century Europe, particularly north
eastern England, there were tremendous earthworks built to
support the archaic mining railways. The mines were often far
into the hills, and the railways went down to the nearest
waterway where the ships could come in and collect the coal.
Going uphill the horse or horses pulled the wagons. Downhill they
rode in a "handycart" attached at one end. So used to the
drill were the horses that trotting around and boarding the
handycart was automatic. For the rest, the movement was
controlled by brakes and wedges at the wheels.
          There still stands in County Durham, England, what is
probably the first railway viaduct in the world. It is the
magnificent Tanfield Arch, built in 1727. The mines it served
were probably worked out at the end of he century, but like the
Roman aqueducts it still stands and it is designated an ancient
monument by the government.
          Mechanical engineering also had much to do with
military matters.It is not absurd to suggest that the first
spring was the bow, and the most primitive internal combustion
engine was the cannon. But just as mining produced the first
railed tracks,so did mining produce the first steam engines..
Their work was to pump out the water that was always flooding=g
the workings. 
          Early in the eighteenth century, in England, Thomas
Newcomen made the first commercially practicable reciprocating
steam engines, for pumping water from mines. The real power was
that of the atmosphere, for steam was admitted simply to create a
vacuum in the bottom of the cylinder by condensation. James Watt,
a Scot(1736-1819) improved on Newcomen's system by providing a
separate condenser, greatly increasing the action of the engine,
and also producing the first practical rotary motion by crank and
flywheel (initially with a "sun-and-planet" gear, as the crank
was covered by another man's patent). Watt's engine could drive
other machines as well as work a pump. Pressure was still very
low. 
          At the end of the eighteenth century came Richard
Trevithick, a Celt from Cornwall where ha was an official and
engineer in one of the tin mines. He it was who applied high
pressure steam to the driving of a double-acting reciprocating
engine. The slide valve for steam admission and exhaust had been
invented by one of James Watt's men, William Murdoch. The
Trevithick engine was small, compact and immensely powerful for
its size. It was the answer to the industrialist's prayer. The
huge low pressure engines of Watt had needed a large building to
house them, but one could put a Trevithick engine anywhere.
          Watt was much annoyed, and playing on the idea that the
use of high pressure steam was very dangerous, publicly announced
that his rival should be hanged. But at least there was a steam
engine sufficiently compact to make the locomotive a practical
possibility.
          Attempts had been made already. At the turn of the
1760's-70's Nicolas Cugot, a French artillery officer, had
produced a steam wagon for gun traction on roads, propelled by a
kettle-shaped boiler supplying steam to a pair of single-acting
cylinders which drove a single front wheel through ratchet and
cog. It did  move itself but was unmanageable as well as being
able to steam of only a short while.
          Murdoch, too, had experimented with a very small model
locomotive ( again not for rails) fired by a spirit lamp. This
ran quite well; it was a most engaging toy. Murdoch's chief,
James Watt, was not amused.
          Trevithick, however, approached locomotives vert
seriously, first with a model, and then with full-sized road
locomotives, basing them on his existing engine which had already
been put to commercial use. With his partner Vivian in Cornwall,
he built a steam road carriage which they drove along the roads
from Redruth to Plymouth in 1802, there shipping it to London
where it was demonstrated to an unenthusiastic public. It was in
fact the first motor car, and people were not ready for cars.
Further it got damaged, and now became apparent a fatal flaw in
Trevithick's character.
          He was a giant among original inventors and mechanical
engineers. He was on the other hand a spectacularly bad business
man. If anything broke, or otherwise went wrong, he ignored it
and went on to something else, like an artist burning an
unsuccessful picture. But although the steam carriage was lost,
not all was lost.
          In the winter of 1803-4, Trevithick was in the south of
Wales, and it was there that the first railway locomotive was to
be born. It was to be demonstrated at the Penydarren mining
railway, or tramroad, as it was called, near Merthyr Tydfil. On
February 21, 1804, it was publicly steamed. Even in stern,
evangelical Wales, it was a time of heavy betting. The owner of
Penydarren Ironworks wagered a neighbouring ironmaster that the
"travelling engine" would haul 10 English tons of iron on the
tramroad from Penydarren to Abercynon, a distance of 9 3/4 miles.
The stakes were 500 guineas(525 lbs sterling in gold).
Trevithick's locomotive made the journey in 4 hours, 5 minutes,
with the stipulated load of,on top of which seventy men had
climbed to enjoy the ride. The track was of flanged iron rails on
stone blocks, the common form of the period.
          Original drawings have not survived, at any rate
entire, but from certain very old drawings contemporary with
Trevithick, we know enough to make a very close reconstruction of
the engine.
          It was in all important features a locomotive version
of the Trevithick stationary engine, with a single cylinder
driving a transverse shaft and a very large flywheel. The boiler
was internally fired, with a return flue. The power was
transmitted from the shaft through spur wheels to the four wheels
on which the engine was carried. The single cylinder was embedded
in the boiler above the furnace and flue, with the piston rod
issuing at one end to drive a crosshead on two parallel
slidebars, whence the connecting rods went back to cranks on the
transverse shaft at the other end. With little doubt the
crosshead and slidebars are the contribution of William Symington
(1763-1831), the Scots pioneer of steam navigation. Not only is
the actual performance of Trevithick's locomotive on record; so
is her fuel consumption. Two hundredwieght of coal sufficed for
her trial run.
          Did Trevithick press home this advantage with a rich
patron who had backed his engine with such a princely wager?
          Well he might have done, but the wonder was a thing of
a few months only. For the first time, but not the last, it was
seen how an iron locomotive smashed to pieces the flanged cast-
iron plates which formed the early rails. A sufficiently
substantial wooden way, even, would have answered better.
          Yet Trevithick had made a contribution to technological
history anticipating, in magnitude, the first flights of the
Wright brothers in the US, ninety-nine years later. Here and
there an odd Trevithick locomotive cropped up. There was one,
locally known as Black Billy, in the Northumbrian coalfields of
northeastern England, which seems to have been an unfortunate
venture. 
          In London again, Trevithick showed yet another steam
locomotive he had built called Catch-me-who-can, on a circular
track in the northern suburbs of that time near the present
Euston Road. Round the circle was a high fence, to guard against
the thing becoming a free show. The curious were admitted at a
shilling a head, which covered a ride for the more adventurous
ones in an adapted carriage drawn by the little locomotive. The
latter appears, from an old drawing, to have been smaller than
the Penydarren engine, without the big flywheel and complex
gears; a sort of mechanical horse on rails. The outfit was a
circus of sorts, but be it remembered that the visitors were
truly the first fare-paying passengers ever to be hauled on the
rail by any sort of locomotive. 
          There was no high-powered advertising in those days;
the newspapers were awesomely indifferent. Before long there was
a derailment. It does not seem to have been serious, with anyone
badly hurt, or we would have heard about it from people that
detested the mere existence of any sort of engine. But it was
enough for the ingenious inventor to again lose interest. Very
possibly he was too hard up to repair the damage. He was often
so.
          Thus the true father of the powered railway train
passes out of its history. Yet not only is that to be claimed for
him. He was the father of all mechanical land transport, for his
steam road carriage of 1802, unlike Cugot's unmanageable machine,
was the first of its kind to carry people on a real journey.
ENDS