Now lets be serious here. R&D stopped in 1937 when Fury blew up. Ok there was an attempt by Bullid to buck the trend, which was largely successful. The Rugby testing plant was really getting somewhere then it was closed.

There is no doubt in many enthusiast minds that the oil lobby won, and the coal lobby lost. Steam on the road was also killed by the taxation brought in 1932, again as part of the lobbying by oil and rubber companies. As far as I am aware electronics have never been used on a reciprocating steam engine, so for example automatic cut off has never been tried?
 

I am writing a book about steam buses, which ran in London from 1903 to about 1920. Smooth quite, very rapid acceleration, beaten by a cartel and forced out. 
 

But the central thing is that engineers worked with what fuel they had.

A group of Swiss engineers have a scheme to generate steam from a central rubbish plant and to use the storage capacity of steam to run every vehicle within an airport. The CO2 and costings are impressive. Can they get funding? Can they heck.

so everyone is rushing down the hydrogen route, which is very difficult to compress and store, ignoring all other opportunities, and using precious metals in fuel cells which are only marginally better at conversion than - a steam engine! So why not use the technology that we have already, technicians already building engines and boilers, and burn hydrogen or better still methanol derived from scrap wood with solar and wind energy doing the distilling?

Picture by coolbowers on Twitter at Chester

Maybe steam is not dead. In the meantime  Tornado has been out today stretching its legs, remember brand new a few years ago, built entirely by enthusiasts funded by enthusiasts and pulling revenue earning train but burning Russian coal because of the PC brigade shipped right around Europe. About 6 or 8 full size ‘extinct locos are in the process of being created. What we need is bio coal. It is being and can be made, but no R&D and no government interest- sound familiar?
 

end of rant!

Russell Bulley C.Eng B.Eng MIET

Now lets be serious here. R&D stopped in 1937 when Fury blew up. Ok there was an attempt by Bullid to buck the trend, which was largely successful. The Rugby testing plant was really getting somewhere then it was closed.

There is no doubt in many enthusiast minds that the oil lobby won, and the coal lobby lost. Steam on the road was also killed by the taxation brought in 1932, again as part of the lobbying by oil and rubber companies. As far as I am aware electronics have never been used on a reciprocating steam engine, so for example automatic cut off has never been tried?
 

I am writing a book about steam buses, which ran in London from 1903 to about 1920. Smooth quite, very rapid acceleration, beaten by a cartel and forced out. 
 

But the central thing is that engineers worked with what fuel they had.

A group of Swiss engineers have a scheme to generate steam from a central rubbish plant and to use the storage capacity of steam to run every vehicle within an airport. The CO2 and costings are impressive. Can they get funding? Can they heck.

so everyone is rushing down the hydrogen route, which is very difficult to compress and store, ignoring all other opportunities, and using precious metals in fuel cells which are only marginally better at conversion than - a steam engine! So why not use the technology that we have already, technicians already building engines and boilers, and burn hydrogen or better still methanol derived from scrap wood with solar and wind energy doing the distilling?

Picture by coolbowers on Twitter at Chester

Maybe steam is not dead. In the meantime  Tornado has been out today stretching its legs, remember brand new a few years ago, built entirely by enthusiasts funded by enthusiasts and pulling revenue earning train but burning Russian coal because of the PC brigade shipped right around Europe. About 6 or 8 full size ‘extinct locos are in the process of being created. What we need is bio coal. It is being and can be made, but no R&D and no government interest- sound familiar?
 

end of rant!

Russell Bulley C.Eng B.Eng MIET