On an Australian desert railway, half of every steam train's load was water
The Trans-Australian Railway crosses no permanent freshwater stream anywhere along its route. Steam engines there drank bore water loaded with magnesium chloride, which wrecked their boilers in under a quarter of their normal lifespan, and roughly half the weight each train hauled was water for the locomotive. Its operator became an early convert to diesel-electric power.
Water was the heart of the machine. Heated in the boiler, it turns to steam and swells to 1,600 or 1,700 times its volume, and that expansion pushes pistons linked to the driving wheels. Fuel supply mattered as much. Russia's first locomotive, built by the Cherepanovs in 1834, had no coal nearby, burned through the surrounding woods and was replaced by horses.
Britain pioneered the technology. Richard Trevithick's high-pressure engines made locomotives light enough to be practical, and his 1804 visit to Newcastle turned the collieries of north-east England into the main testing ground. His Catch Me Who Can of 1808 was the first to carry fare-paying passengers. Matthew Murray's Salamanca of 1812 was the first to make money, and Puffing Billy, built in 1813 and 1814, is the oldest one still preserved. After Robert Stephenson's Rocket won the Rainhill Trials in 1829, his firm supplied engines across Britain, much of Europe and the United States; Germany's Adler, which first ran between Nuremberg and Fürth on 7 December 1835, was the 118th locomotive from his works.
America built its own too. Steamboat pioneer John Fitch made a working model in 1794, which survives in Columbus, Ohio, and Peter Cooper's Tom Thumb of 1830 was the first commercial American-built engine to run in the country, built mainly to show what steam could do. Wider American clearances later allowed monsters like Union Pacific's Big Boy, weighing 540 long tons.
Speed became a British obsession. Near the end of the steam era the LNER's Mallard reached 126 miles an hour, a steam record still unbroken, though claims that a Pennsylvania locomotive topped 150 were never proven. Diesel and electric traction took over from the late 1930s, and most steam engines had left regular service by the 1980s. One Austrian engine, built in 1860, has never been withdrawn and still pulls excursions.
Source: Steam locomotive
