Friday, May 02, 2003

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This weekend, I found myself between business meetings in London and Dublin. As it turns out, a friend and colleague who lives in the UK has an exotic hobby he invited me to share. He owns an antique steam locomotive and is a licensed locomotive engineer. If my facts are right, his locomotive auditioned for the part of the Hogwart Express in the Harry Potter movies but lost out to another. But the story doesn’t end there. His locomotive is being used to promote the movie and has been trucked around Britain on the back of a flatbed truck. In one town the truck broke down and created a disturbance worthy of Harry himself.

A steam locomotive is difficult to photograph. To see it all means you lose all the detail that makes it interesting. To see the detail, you lose the massiveness and majesty of the beast. But here are a few photos you might enjoy.

A steam engine consumes coal, obviously, but ti also consumes water. With each stroke of the piston, some water-turned steam is lost and has to be replaced at the next station. At the end of of our journey we stopped for water and coal (5 tons of coal in an afternoon - not an inexpensive hobby). 

Posted by Digital Quixote in • Trains
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