Customer Reviews

How a Steam Locomotive Works

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

I have worked as a steam locomotive fireman at a rail museum and I hold a Traction Engineer license in the State of Minnesota and I buy a lot of old steam technical books. I was pleasantly surprised that this book is more than just another simple overview of how steam locomotives work. For a relatively slim volume of less than 100 pages, this book goes into detail and uses classic illustrations of individual components. Many of the illustrations are from the "C&O Manual for Locomotive Firemen". There are sidebars called "Technical Details" on subjects such as poppet valves, counterbalancing, tractive effort and piston thrust, train resistance and even the Bernoulli effect. The introduction is written by Bill Withuhn of the Smithsonian. This book is much more than "the boiler makes the steam, and steam pushes the piston". At the same time, I think it is written in a way that a newcomer will understand it. I wish this book was available 20 years ago when I first got interested in this hobby.

This book is quite informative about steam locomotives and have enjoyed paging through it. I recommend this book to anyone interested in a good overview of how these magnificent machines work ! Lots of great info collected in the same place. I like all the technical details/graphs/diagrams presented.

A couple of issues :

1) The text/narrative tends to be very jumpy at times. Bouncing around from piece of information to another without much segue between the pieces. Some of it seems to be copied/pasted from other sources.

2) Almost all the pictures are overprocessed. I'm sure most of the pictures were borrowed from other older books/material and probably scanned in and processed. The pictures should be nice sharp black & white images with lots of detail. Instead on too many of the pictures the contrast is blown out, highlights shot, leaving the pictures washed out, details gone, dull-looking, flat and looking out of focus. Whomever did the image postprocessing should revisit the book and correct the images.

That's why I can't give the book 5 stars.

So many people today don't understand how anything works, and need a little more than 'forced' teaching. This is an easy to read, and well written book that gives the fundamentals of the steam powered locomotives of the past. It won't turn anyone into an engineer, but gives the reader an understanding of what made these engines work.

As a ex fitter in the New Zealand Railways, I found this book one of the easiest to follow and informative enough to explain the complex working of a steam locomotive with all its parts and attachments that go into making one of these magnificent machines. For someone who is interested in what makes a steam locomotive tick but doesn't want to get bogged down with to much technical jargon, this book is a must. All the information is well documented with all the photographs and text there to show exactly how these now rare machines operated in there hay day.

The book is a very useful clearly written illustrated account of how steam locomotives operated. The material is generally quite clearly written and extremely well illustrated. I was able to learn a lot about steam locomotive technology by reading this wonderful book. This book is the reference and guide for anyone who wants to really know more about how steam locomotives operated. This work is a must for rail fans.

The lady knows her stuff, very good about getting down to how everthing happens in a Steam Locomotive