It is he who ably condensed Dempsey’s voluminous manuscript into the present book. He too was a railway engineer, had in fact been Locomotive Superintendent at the Great North of Scotland Railway 1853–55, and wrote comprehensive books of his own on railway engineering matters. This is where the second author name comes in: Daniel Kinnear Clark (1822–1896), a near contemporary to Dempsey but with the good (one hopes) fortune to live rather longer. 1815) died, young, in 1859, in India where he was architectural engineer of the Great Indian Peninsula Railway and Vice-President of the Bombay Mechanics Institute. Steam and especially railroad historians may deduce from the year of first publication, 1879, that it was published posthumously because Dempsey (b. The first of the two parts the book is divided into is a deliberately slow, thorough introduction to the fundamentals of this form of locomotion.

Moreover, the book is British and the first and probably most important of the five machines in the auction is an entirely original survivor of a British-built locomotive from 1834, the Mississippi believed to be the first locomotive in the American South.Ĭonsidering when and by/for whom this book was written, one of the great advantages to the modern reader is that the book’s original reader also knew little to nothing about steam. While nothing is said about why this text was “lost” or why it is being reissued now, anyone planning to attend the October 2015 Bonhams auction (at the Simeone Foundation Automotive Museum) of “Historic Locomotives of National Importance” belonging to the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago will have just enough time to brush up on first principles of steam locos explained so lucidly here.

Why bother reprinting a book without giving today’s reader a reason to care? It is a phenomenal shame that the person introducing the book, Pete Waterman, or for that matter the publisher are not making the historic significance of this book clear, merely calling it a “ contemporary volume” and a “ lost publication.” Nor is anything biographical said about any of the three names on the cover. If it weren’t for the flowery prose one could completely forget that this book was written over a hundred-thirty years ago! Let us become such inquirers, and endeavour to ascertain those means.” but the sight of a complicated and apparently cumbrous machine, moving itself under the mere direction of a human driver, forcibly overcoming not only its own inertia, but that of the many heavy carriages and trucks which helplessly follow its chains, is a demonstration of mechanical agency which, however often it may be witnessed, arrests the attention in every instance, and leads the mind to contemplate the means employed, or to inquire what those means are.

The Victorian Steam Locomotive: Its Design and Development 1804–1879

Victorian railways locomotive drawings