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Encyclopedia of Trains and Locomotives By David Ross Comprehensive guide 900 loc
The Encyclopedia of Trains and Locomotives By David Ross Comprehensive guide to over 900 steam, diesel and electric locomotives from 1825 to present day.
Hard Cover W/ Dust jacket
Copyright 2003
544 Pages Heavy book
Contents
INTRODUCTION6
PART ONE: STEAM LOCOMOTIVES8
1825-189912
1900-192464
1925-1939126
1940-1981186
PART Two: DIESEL LOCOMOTIVES AND TRAINS 242
1906-1961246
1962-2002312
PART THREE: ELECTRIC LOCOMOTIVES AND TRAINS380
1884-1945384
1946-2003418
GLOSSARY524
INDEX536
PICTURE CREDITS544
AMONG THE INVENTIONS that define the modern age, the railway train holds a prime position. The steam engine had already existed for over a hundred years when in 1804, as a locomotive engine, it first moved under its own power on land. By 1825 the train had come into its own, and with its appearance, the modern world truly begins. The era of mass travel, of bulk haulage, of rapid national and international distribution of goods and information had arrived. The transcontinental railway helped to weld the United States into a nation, and later facilitated the Russian Revolution. Railways were the vital infrastructure of trade and industry in the vast colonial domains of Africa and Australasia. Among the rival nations of Europe their strategic value was well understood from the beginning. The potential of the new machine released a flood of daring and ingenuity from engineers and technicians. Tunnels and viaducts, electrical communication, signalling techniques, grand public architecture - all demonstrated the revolution that railways brought to everyday life. Synchronised time was brought to communities that had previously set their clocks to suit themselves, or lived by the passage of the sun. But in less obvious ways too, in precision measurement, metallurgy, statistics, physics and dynamics, and business management, the existence and demands of railways drove experiment and knowledge forwards.
For more than a hundred years, steam power was the basis of the railway. Coal was the prime fuel, though other fuels were also used to make steam, from wood to powdered peat, from sugar-cane stalks to cotton waste and corn cobs, and, increasingly from the 1890s, oil. The great age of the railway was from 1850 to 1920 - during this period it dominated land transport. The invention of the internal combustion engine, enabling powered road transport, did not seem a major threat at first. Electric traction was particularly welcomed and developed by coal-less countries like Italy. Though electric trams put some suburban steam lines out of business, they often, as in France and Belgium, provided a complementary service to the railways. The First World War, with its speeding-up of motor car and truck technology, and Henry Ford's creation of the assembly line and the cheap motor car in the 1920s brought the car, coach and truck to the stage of real rivalry with railways in the industrialised nations. The railways fought back, themselves adopting the new technology and also building bigger, faster, more efficient steam locomotives. Nowhere was this process more apparent than in the United States of America, where the greatest titans of steam were built even as their glory was being eclipsed by the oncoming diesel-electrics.
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