steam porn
Aug. 28th, 2014 10:59 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
twoelevenour trip to england ended with a side trip to sheffield and the peak district national park. i have some pictures of those. i'm going start posting them before i post stuff stuff about the con itself, mostly because i have to turn my fragmentary notes into something coherent.
one of the places i visited in sheffield was the kelham island museum, which is about sheffield's once-mighty steel industry. one of the museum's centerpieces is the don river engine, a 12,000 horsepower (~9 megawatt) steam engine that used to drive a rolling mill:
since rolling mills make steel sheet harder by squeezing it between rollers, they need to be able to reverse direction to run the sheet back and forth repeatedly. despite the engine's obviously huge rotational momentum, it was able to reverse in under two seconds. consider the similar problem of getting a tractor-trailer rig up to highway speed and then getting it to shift into reverse in two seconds. now consider doing that without leaving most of its power train scattered along the highway; that's what this engine used to do. they even have a movie of it doing that.
the museum ran the engine for a few minutes while i was there, but between the crowd and the difficult light (from one end of the room) i didn't try to get any video... so no hard-core steam-on-steel action. but have some steam-age industrial porn anyway.
one of the places i visited in sheffield was the kelham island museum, which is about sheffield's once-mighty steel industry. one of the museum's centerpieces is the don river engine, a 12,000 horsepower (~9 megawatt) steam engine that used to drive a rolling mill:
since rolling mills make steel sheet harder by squeezing it between rollers, they need to be able to reverse direction to run the sheet back and forth repeatedly. despite the engine's obviously huge rotational momentum, it was able to reverse in under two seconds. consider the similar problem of getting a tractor-trailer rig up to highway speed and then getting it to shift into reverse in two seconds. now consider doing that without leaving most of its power train scattered along the highway; that's what this engine used to do. they even have a movie of it doing that.
the museum ran the engine for a few minutes while i was there, but between the crowd and the difficult light (from one end of the room) i didn't try to get any video... so no hard-core steam-on-steel action. but have some steam-age industrial porn anyway.
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Date: Aug. 29th, 2014 08:08 am (UTC)