Engine Punk

A small train dwarfs its engine I stumbled upon this survivor quite by accident. It was at the Pontypool and Blaenavon Railway . I'd had a good poke around the Big Pit mining museum and heard the steam trains were running that day so went to have a look. The station building is a new one incorporating bits of old ones nearby and when I came on the platform I was promised a train was on its way. We soon began to hear one approaching. It got nearer and nearer and noisier and noisier but there wasn't even a puff of smoke on the horizon. I checked for loudspeakers but the station staff were guileless creatures and kept nodding to the distant valley, saying, "It'll be here soon." On and on it came but still there was no visual sign of it. "Is it a ghost train?" I asked and they roared with laughter. "Nobody's ever asked that before," said the station master, "but I can see what you mean." Five minutes later and it's...

Merddin Emrys at Porthamdog station, June 2012 I've always been mildly fascinated by articulated steam locomotives. How do they keep the steam leaking out when they go round corners? But - having been brought up on the Rev Awdry's railway stories - Fairlie engines bothered me a bit. They were siamese versions of the twin engines and would surely be arguing all the time and not much of a Really Useful Engine. Or would that be engines? However, now that the Skarloey Railway has its own Double Fairlie in the shape and form of Mighty Mac, I am more comfortable with engines that are literally a steam locomotive equivalent of Dr Doolittle's push-me-pull-you and was recently lucky enough to see both Double and Single varieties in action on the Festiniog Railway . The Festiniog is the spiritual home of the Fairlie locomotive. Although the prototype Fairlies ran in the UK, they were most successful abroad where steep and windy conditions prevailed. The Festiniog was the ...

Nature has now reclaimed this slate quarry At the Lanlivery Show last year, I bought a book entitled Steam Engines and Waterwheels and this mentioned reports in the Model Engineer during the fifties of a surviving Cornish beam engine in the Dorothea Quarry near Nantlle, in Carnavonshire. From further research on the net, I learned that the old engine was still there and had been restored in the seventies but had fallen on hard times since then, as its location was away from the traditional tourist routes and access was poor. Red rag to a bull this was - charge! Dorothea Quarry is these days a well known diving attraction - although not for me as I'm far from being amphibious . In fact it was when the electric pumping engines were turned off in 1970 that the quarry became flooded. Since 1951, electric pumps unwatered the workings, which went down over a 100 metres, but the old steam engine was kept as a back up and last worked in 1956. At one stage the area was contained ...

This is how the Cornish engine looks today In a book on the industrial archaeology of the South Wales coalfields, I discovered the intriguing Glyn Pits engines. One of these is a Cornish style beam engine built by the Neath Abbey Ironworks that's been in its engine house since 1845. We have plenty of engine houses in Cornwall but very few contain their engines. When the mines were worked out (or knacked, as we say down here) the engines were often moved to new locations and could almost be said to be portable - but only with a lot of effort involving teams of horses, oxen and latterly traction engines. Anyone wishing to know more about this should Jack Trounson's Cornish Engines and the Men Who Handled Them . After the coal mine closed in 1932, the engines at Glyn Pits remained in situ for maintaining neighbouring mines by the National Coal Board, albeit electric pumps were in operation by the time the site was finally abandoned in 1966. They are now a little out off th...

This Land Rover looked normal but smelt different. It sounded like any V8 ought to. I was in Wales recently and experienced probably the wettest weather on holiday that I've ever known. However, the Abergavenny Show still went ahead and sheltering under the trees next to the traction engines I found this wood burning Land Rover 101. In the back is a slow wood burning stove designed to produce a steady supply of syngas, a mixture of carbon monoxide and hydrogen that can then used for combustion in a conventional petrol engine. This vehicle is a work in progress under continuous development. I spoke briefly to the owner who explained the general principles and pointed me to wood gas resources on the internet . It seems that many people in the US are exploring gasifiers as their - er - gas prices go up and in a land where pickups are common the bulk of the gas generating equipment isn't such a problem. This is a close up of the gasifier in the back of the Land Rover. ...

Look closely and every car has been vandalised Also on my travels in Wales I found this garage. There were row upon row of Jags many of which had suffered fire damage. The front row all had smashed windscreens. I'm no forensic expert but Jags don't just go up in flames like this without some encouragement. Or break their windscreens by themselves. I found this very sad. Here was once a successful business. Now it's a graveyard of missed opportunities to get a few Coventry cats back to life. Some of them could yet be saved, especially the undamaged ones but probably by the time you read this they will all have gone the same way. Among the Jags was this Ferrari 308GT4. That at least surely should be saved. Even if its a dark brown one. They say this colour is coming back in. On Google Earth the place looks a bit livelier and the cars more loved. The sign in the picture above of the Ferrari reads Swffryd Fish Bar Another smoked cat. Not so long ago this wa...

Captain Sensible is mature beyond his years (in a reverse direction of course) Photo : Official Damned website The Damned played in Falmouth at the Princess Pavilions last night and were like a tin of Ronseal - they did exactly what is said on the label. The Princess Pavilions is an old theatre that is growing older disgracefully but has recently been done up - a contradiction in terms but it seemed to welcome such outrageousness from these punk pioneers. The Damned have always had a strong image and Dave Vanian the gothfather looked very much at home. He can sing, too. I reckon Dave's got one of the best voices in rock today and he still delivers. During the set, the drummer, Pinch, was watching some overpaid prima donna's kicking a pig's bladder about and kept updating some of the audience who might have been interested in the score but this didn't detract at all from the show and added to the humour and intimacy. Apparently, the desired outcome was achieved ...

This man is going to buy something with two wheels and very soon This little bike caught our attention at Wiscombe Park. Most things in black and gold do but Pete had some cash burning a hole in his pocket (which has now become a Matchless single) and we began to have covetous thoughts about Velocette 250s. Of nearly square dimensions (78 x 78.5mm), the MOV is a rev-happy little chappy. According to Titch Allen in his splendid book The Velocette Saga , David Holmes developed his MOV to spin up to 10,000rpm and subsequnetly reduced the rev range to 8,500 to provide more useable power on the race track. It must be nice for the rider to know they're nowhere near the bloodline when they're ringing its neck. It would still do 100mph, and although it's a production bike, the Suzuki X7 was billed as the first ton up 250 when that was introduced in 1979. That would be 30 years after the MOV went out of production and - of course - the two bikes are not really comparable as on...

The Triangle Skinner Special awaits its turn in the paddock at sunny Wiscombe Park this year. The Triangle Skinner is yet another special to which John Bolster introduced me with his classic book Specials . It seems incredible to me now that it began life as a 1931 Morris Minor and the side valve version at that, which was built to sell at £100. Nowadays, it sports a straight eight Hudson engine of 4168cc. Little remains of that 847cc Morris Minor. It was rather a special Morris Minor, for it was a publicity stunt that used special steel cylinder blocks albeit of the same 57 x 83mm dimensions as the iron production variety. These allowed lubrication pressures of 70 psi and had a bevel drive for a vertically mounted supercharger. Equipped with a Powerplus blower and single seater bodywork it was campaigned by Bill van der Becke (who is also famous for the Becke Powerplus, which used a Wolseley ohc engine) and was officially sanctioned in a weak moment by Sir William Morris himsel...

I closely watch this man play but still can't fathom how he does it. (Photo :  Efestivals) I've seen Wilko Johnson and his band twice now and been blown away both times by perfectly crafted blues rock, belted out by three of the best musicians in the business. They look like they're melting as cotton shirts assume a shine like wet-look vinyl. It's a good look on these guys, though, as they draw on the energy from the crowd, energy they put out to begin with but get back with interest. Latin-scholar Wilko looks scary but isn't really. He's not machine gunning you with his guitar he's peppering your soul with licks you can't understand even when he's explaining them in slow mo on YouTube. How he plays his guitar is still a mystery when he strives to make it look simple. He's left handed but plays as if he's right handed, which goes some way to make sense, and loops his thumb over the top of the guitar to play rhythm. Beyond that, I'm ...

Running as No.42 on the Saturday at the VSCC meeting at Wiscombe Park, RIP shows off its Morgan ancestry parked next to a slightly more venerable 1924 example. The RIP Special leapt out at me from the pages of John Bateman's Enthusiast's Guide to Vintage Specials . This book is a splendid sequel to John Bolster's earlier tome on the breed, entitled simply Specials , and features some weird and wonderful mechanical contrivances, all built with sole purpose of going fast up a hill. RIP is the minimalist expression of that Holy Grail, the four wheeled motorbike. Actually, RIP is a four wheeled Morgan three-wheeler. Possibly RIP's best view. Tailgaters are not a problem. That doped canvas is what I like best about the RIP Special and gives this little car its name. RIP is rakish For a long time I was given to understand that conversions of Morgan three-wheelers into mere cars never had the desired expectation of improving performance. Perhaps have a diff-less...