Salamanca (locomotive)

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Salamanca
Depiction on the painting The Collier from 1814. The locomotive shown is the Salamanca .
Reproduced gear

Salamanca was the name of the first commercially successful steam locomotive . It was in 1812 by Matthew Murray in Holbeck built for those on cast iron fish-belly rails propelled Middleton Railway from Middleton to Leeds . It got its name in honor of Duke of Wellington's victory in the Battle of Salamanca , which had been fought in the same year and started work on this line on June 24, 1812 as the first economically successful "traveling engine" (steam locomotive) in England to work. It had a sister machine "Prince Regent", which was delivered in the same year.

design type

Salamanca weighed five tons and was the first steam locomotive with two cylinders . It was also the first rack-and-pinion locomotive with a rack and pinion design patented by John Blenkinsop . A single rack ran outside the 1,245 mm (4 ft 1 in ) narrow gauge rails, which was meshed with a large gear on the center axle on the left side of the locomotive. The pinion was driven by the double cylinder embedded at the top of the fire tube boiler. The pistons with a 203 × 508 mm (8 × 20 inch) bore × stroke were guided in linear bearings instead of the parallel movement common in earlier locomotives. The engines were in service for up to twenty years.

history

Four such locomotives were built for the railroad. Salamanca was destroyed in its sixth year of operation (February 28, 1818) when its boiler exploded due to a lack of water . According to George Stephenson's testimony before a parliamentary committee, the engine driver had tampered with the boiler safety valve. As a result of the force of the explosion, the engine driver was thrown into an adjacent field a hundred meters away. Another boiler explosion occurred on February 12, 1834, again killing the Führer. This time the cause was probably the badly worn boiler, due to the in-house repairs which were no longer professionally carried out after Blenkinsop's death. James Hewitt, killed on this occasion, was the first regular train driver in the world. The following year they returned to the horse business and abandoned the use of steam, apart from a section about 1 mile long, which had been served for some time by a stationary steam engine using a chain hoist. The steam service was reintroduced in 1866 and in 1881 the railway was switched to standard gauge, so that there was the possibility of a connection with the Midland Railway. The American locomotive Best Friend of Charleston suffered
a similar fate as the Salamanca with a boiler explosion in 1831 for similar reasons.

The world's first regular professional train driver was former mine worker James Hewitt. He was trained by Fenton, Murray & Wood.

Salamanca is described in the September 1814 edition of the Annals of Philosophy as follows: "Some time ago a steam engine was mounted on wheels in Leeds to move itself and several coal-laden wagons along a rail by means of a rack." The article mentions the use of another cogwheel locomotive about a mile north of Newcastle ( Blücher in Killingworth ) and one without a cogwheel ( Puffing Billy in Wylam ).

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Hamilton Ellis: The Pictorial Encyclopedia of Railways . The Hamlyn Publishing Group, 1968, p. 20.
  2. ^ Curiosities of Locomotive Design . Catskill. Retrieved March 22, 2008.
  3. ↑ Gerald Nabarro: Steam Nostalgia: Locomotive and Railway Preservation in Great Britain . Routledge and Kegan Paul, London 1972, ISBN 0-7100-7391-7 .
  4. ^ Leeds Mercury March 7, 1818
  5. ↑ steamrailwaylines.co.uk: Middleton Railway ( Memento of the original from August 16, 2016 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was automatically inserted and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.steamrailwaylines.co.uk
  6. ↑ Thomas Thomson: Annals of Philosophy , Volume IV. Robert Baldwin, 1814 (accessed December 16, 2014).