23 May
2014
23 May
'14
3:01 p.m.
On 22/05/2014 21:48, Robert Jarratt wrote:
To be fair, when they had a large number of steam angines and models at
the London Science Musuem, very few were run 'in steam', A lot were
operated by rotating the flywheels eitehr with electric motors or with
hand knovs (on the smaller models), the latter were very educational to
me as I could watch the valve gear linkages as the thing was turned slowly.
There are of course many other msueums in Enland which have steam
engiens, some of which are runb in steam, orthers are rotate by an
electric motor or similar. I see nothing wrogn with the latter, provided
it's expaliend that is what is being done, it is certain;y preferable to
not seeign the hting move at all (or worse, not seing the enginer/model
even static).
Have you visited MOSI at all? I haven't been
recently, but they have lots of
stationary steam engines which are often in steam, I could spend hours
watching those. They also have lots of locomotives and aircraft too, but
most of those are not operational. I am sure Dave could give you a more up
to date status on all those things though.
There was a long period when the Steam
Engines didn't run because the
boiler needed replacing, and there may be things that are currently not being demonstrated due to a health and safety revue.
This includes the
Hartree Differential Analyser pending the fitting of more emergency stop
ARGH!. One does wonder how people maanged to survive 50 eyars ago...
buttons, so we get issues there as well.... They also
have a Steam
Locomotive which is frequently in steam with rides available. For
computing they have the replica SSEM, or Baby. A valve computer with
Williams Tube stores.
Are the scheamtics for the SSEM available anywhere (and if not, why not?) ?
-tony