Just something different:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Q9fKOHC_ck

Enjoy!
Mark

The museum at Beamish is a fascinating place, but one really must want to visit to get there. It's off the beaten track in the north of England. In fact, it was once known as "The North of England Open Air Museum." It features a circular tram (trolley) line that drops visitors at a number of sites on its 300-acre campus, a village main street with buildings brought in from all over the region, a row of stone pit cottages, a minehead, a huge forging hammer, a railway station and track, locomotives cars, etc., and lots of costumed staff. If you visit, plan to spend the day to absorb it all. Here's a link: http://www.beamish.org.uk

Sounds like an English counterpart to Henry Ford's "Greenfield Village" in Dearborn/Detroit, MI.

in days of old,
when knights were bold,
and side rods not invented...

Simply amazing.

Boy, that is an odd duck... er, elephant... I love how the Brits take on these "just make a new one" projects.

I thought I was familiar with pretty much all of the geared steam locomotive designs that were actually built, then somebody comes up with another one.

1815! That's nearly 200 years ago! This is like cranking up the "Wayback Machine". Electricity was just a laboratory curiosity. Information traveled no faster than the hooves of a horse or the sails of a ship (there were a few steamboats, but nobody would try to cross the ocean in one). Photography was still many years in the future. Typewriter and Linotypes were even further down the time line. The phlogiston theory had been disproved in the time of many scholars still living. Running water and indoor plumbing were almost unheard of. The replica Steam Elephant is a marvelous link to the dawn of mechanically-powered transportation.

RE: 1815, yes, and this was at a time before milling machines, or even toolposts on lathes. Imagine turning a shaft on a lathe that looks more like a freehand wood lathe? Imagine nearly all the work is completed close to dimension by hot forging, and then finished by chisel and scraper?

Notice in the video how the driving wheels are held to the axle by a washer and a wedge/key driven into the end of the axle.

This part of North East England is saturated in early railway history; this is where it all started. As far as anyone can tell, the miners began digging out coal on the banks of the rivers Tyne and Wear, and tipped it into river craft or ships nearby. As the same traffic took the same route all the time they laid down timber tracks for the horse drawn carts or waggons to run on. As time went by, the coal near the river got exhausted, so the miners moved away from the waterway and the tracks got longer. They were called waggonways and the wooden rails began to be covered in iron straps or replaced with cast iron.

There is one notable relic just around the corner from Beamish, about three miles off site.

By 1725 the idea was so well established that a double track waggonway was established from the Tyne at Gateshead to Tanfield Lea, around ten miles, passing over the Causey Arch which has a single span of around 50 feet. The arch is still there today, though it has been out of traffic for somewhere around 250 years. Most of the rest of the waggonway became the Tanfield branch of the North Eastern Railway. After demolition part of it was rebuilt from 1975 as the Tanfield Railway, which has a large collection of colliery and industrial locomotives and stock, and their trains run past the arch on the way to East Tanfield.

Tim