Steam trains and simplicity

Once again, I begin with the statement that I understand most people living today have never experienced a real, up-close, operating steam locomotive. If you appreciate these historical monsters for nothing else--and there's a lot to appreciate--appreciate them for their simplicity. Steam locomotives predate just about all other forms of mechanical transportation propulsion. (Some historians have steamboats pre-dating locomotives by a few years.) The precede electric motors by about thirty years, and internal combustion by at least sixty.

Steam engines, whether stationary or on a railroad locomotive, are simplicity in themselves. You heat water until it boils in a closed vessel and direct the pressure of the contained steam to move something. The steam blowing against blades or pushing against a piston can turn wheels. Everything else is icing on the cake. While blades (in a turbine, perhaps) are easy, they are inefficient. The efficiency obtained when inventors worked out how to direct steam through a valve to opposite sides of the piston at the right times to crank a wheel allowed the steam engine on a locomotive to outperform any other form of propulsion imagined for 150 years. It took better materials engineering, higher-tech knowledge of electricity, and a much more complex system to supplant the steam locomotive with electric or diesel-electric propulsion for railroads, and a full century later for internal gasoline combustion engines to start taking the traveling public off rails and onto public highways.

Its simplicity is what makes steam initially fascinating. Watch a steam locomotive in operation for fifteen or twenty minutes. Even the person with average mechanical inclinations can figure out how it works. Check it out.