Trevithick’s legacy
Tuesday, 19 May 2015
I’m not sure how this…crest…was used, but I find the dragon-lion claw-displaying the spoked wheel just plain odd. Anyway, today we saw many locomotives, train cars, and railroad artifacts. Room after room of them. Fix-it areas. Curation zones with rack after rack of…everything from porcelain dinner sets to chairs to uniform insignia to station signs and model engines and cars of all sizes, plus we found an outdoor viewing platform for real trains on real tracks headed to local and distant destinations. This is the short version of what you can see at the National Railway Museum in York….
Two huge warehouse-display areas featured polished, clean “locos” and carriages. And one had a turntable, and we saw the demo, done by knowledgeable young women wearing “Explainers” on their uniform backs. We discovered that as we walked around the turntable that the reverb from the sound system varied. This was a good spot, but the man fondling his lady could have been distracting.
This was an early carriage. It was a clever merging of three horse-carriage units into one train-carriage. These were low-roofed and made for seating. There was no dining area, and precious little space for baggage. The driver sat on that ledge on the outside left. Think stagecoaches in the Westerns you have seen….
I will spare you the many closeups I took, but being able to see the mechanical parts that move the energy from up-down to around-and-around…I found it humbling in a strange I-grew-up-near-Detroit way.
Jokesters take the reins every once in a while around here…. This is the sign for the library. The library was closed, but the fire extinguisher was getting its annual checkup.
Richard Trevithick adapted steam engines to use high-pressure, and thus be more powerful. Some were built to be stationary. Others were used for railways. He is credited with the first steam rail transport in 1804. If I have it right….