Engine Punk

A Tasker Little Giant showman's tractor basks in the sunshine with a Robey convertible in the background - that's convertible as in convertible from a tractor to a roller. At last the sun really shone and, after weeks of rumours that the the Boconnoc Steam Fair would be cancelled like so many others due to boggy conditions, we all got horrendously sunburnt. Not that anybody really minded. Just look at everyone glowing in the sunshine. A VX4/90 and a Dolomite Sprint sink their differences and wallow in bonhomie  It struck me that although there were many, many cars at the show, there weren't that many bikes. If the bikes lacked in numbers, the quality was high. This proddy racer Commando was my favourite bike. But there were loads of tractors and the tractor pulling was good to watch. Rear wheels spinning, tyre cleats getting smaller with ever run and the front wheels skipping across the ground with big engines on open pipes - luvverly! I particularly e...

As bought This is the Vintage Thing that burst its top hose on the way to Le Mans. It's my Monster Mazda that was renamed Le Monster Mazda in the expectation that it would get us there but it didn't. However, I've got into the habit of calling it that and the name has stuck. So have the L and the E that I've added to the Monster Energy drink logos down its flanks. The home made bodykit made it look very heavy, especially from the rear My involvement with Le Monster Mazda began with a long standing appreciation of the Mazda 323F that was made from 1995 to 1998 (check). These always struck me as a concept car that had somehow made it into production - later 323s are appallingly bland by comparison - and when I spoke to people who owned them they said they loved them. The engines were especially sweet and the best one of the lot from my piston-headed, Engine Punk standpoint was the V6. So I did what any normal person would do. I put a search on Ebay for one an...

A Le Mans start at Le Mans. Rolling starts are much safer but don't create the same spectacle. After a false start, I still went to this year's Le Mans Classic, the false start courtesy of a burst top radiator hose on a forthcoming Vintage Thing wot I own ( watch this space ). It happened on the way to the ferry in Plymouth and fortunately not on the other side of the channel so if it was going to happen that's the way it should've happened. A quick regrouping and assessment of the amount of stuff we proposed taking and the available vehicles at our disposal resulted in us choosing my neighbour's Land Rover Defender as fallback transport. Andrew the tractor man said it handled better loaded down with all our gear and was surprisingly economical on such a long run. Now is not the time to forget your Jag is left hand drive. Or to put your leg through the steering wheel. Fortunately, Alex Buncombe, in the C Type and Peter Mulder in the Gullwing Merc don'...

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...