Engine Punk

The "engraved" side of the commemorative medallion (Photo : Wikimedia) Regular readers of this irregular web log may remember the thunderous silence surrounding revelations over the world’s first motor race. It wasn’t when you first thought it was! Unless you read about here of course. Or here . In short, its was a race between two steam engines in 1867 when the Red Flag Act was in force. That slight legal technicality may have resulted in it being conducted covertly and no-one would have heard about it had not The Engineer magazine published a short paragraph about it after it had occurred. I tried to stir things up in 2017 as the 150th anniversary approached but interest from anyone in the Old Trafford area of Manchester amounted to a big fat zero. They seem to have no interest in historic sporting events whatsoever, even - or especially - if the first ever motor race finished on their doorstep. Steam car builder and researcher Karl A. Petersen was who first put m...

If you'd asked me a couple of weeks ago, I would said 1894, for most authorities cite the Paris – Rouen event as being the first motor race and with internal combustion engine engines it probably was the first. But what if the motors were steam powered? The suggestion that two road steam motors had raced each other in Manchester in 1867 came from Karl Petersen. Karl is a steam car builder in the USA . He e-mailed me to say "Hi" and to introduce himself after my website and blog had turned up on various searches that he'd conducted. He went on to say that during a visit to the Science Museum library in 1971, he'd found an old book on steam road vehicles built before 1890 - William Fletcher's The History and Development of Steam Locomotion on Common Roads. This had belonged to a relative of the legendary locomotive builder and operator Isaac Watt Boulton and contained annotated notes on various matters that subsequently proved quite accurate. Upon revisiting h...

I first came across Edgar Allen Poe when I read a legendary treatise on steam locomotive history. The Chronicles of Boulton's Siding by Arthur Rosling Bennett - er - chronicles the fascinating and mysterious locomotives that Isaac Boulton bought, rebuilt, sold, sometimes bought back, rebuilt again and often finally sold as winding engines to collieries. Many of them had illustrious careers before they appeared at Boulton's siding in Ashton-under-Lyme but once Boulton had converted them for industrial use only someone with an infectious enthusiasm and deep knowledge of his subject could hope to piece their stories together. Rosling Bennett was that man. Many stories remain incomplete despite Bennett's best efforts but this book is the start of many enquiries into ancient locomotive lore. Despite the murky origins of some of these locomotives I especially liked the line drawings that illustrated them in the condition when Boulton owned them. Boulton even bu...