Clever Heavy Engineering

I don't make a habit of trains potting but I do have a soft spot for heavy engineering done to a level of precision that I find incredible for the era in which these engines were built. No computer to aid the designer, to produce fancy finite element stress analyses, to control the milling machine to the nearest 20 millionths of a meter, just a good understanding of what it needs and a bit of extra metal just in case (probably quite a lot of extra metal). Then the guys who put these things together in horrid conditions, without modern health and safety requirements.

Don't get me wrong, I bet these things were a pain to maintain, were inefficient and slow and I wouldn't want to go back to travelling by steam, but there is a great beauty in pre computerised engineering. I'm glad it is being preserved.

Geek moment over