A raised number on a Blackstone bedplate can look like a model designation, a size or even a date. Its meaning may instead be a foundry pattern reference.…
The Lister D was built in Britain as a compact, single-cylinder hot-bulb engine, often classed as a semidiesel, and it became a familiar sight on Australian…
The question of what the ‘oil engine’ versus ‘diesel engine’ distinction meant in the 1910s is partly a problem of period vocabulary. “Diesel” had a fairly…
Railway museums, road-engine rallies and transport festivals provide the setting for this guide to passenger-carrying stationary engine demonstrations in the…
The 1919 National Gas Engine ‘T’ Type is more than an old iron engine: it is a readable record of early industrial power. National machines were built in…
Lucerne’s Swiss Transport Museum, known in German as the Verkehrsmuseum Luzern, is an unusually broad cross-section of transport history. Its galleries place…
Fixed steam power gave UK sawmills a dependable source of mechanical energy in places where watercourses were unreliable, timber handling was heavy and…
Knowing how to identify an engine builder from the flywheel design alone begins with the wheel, but it does not end there. The flywheel records an engine’s…
Across Australia, stationary steam engines turn up in unexpected places: a mine winding house, a former brewery, a pumping station, or a museum workshop.…