Holiday weekend in the UK and an effort to steer the progeny away from cars and soccer for just so long as it takes to review our local heritage. He didn't have a 'favourite' steam-engine, unlike his father, who quite liked the vee-twin... vees a feature of steam-engines long before they were fitted to motor vehicles.
This being at the Bolton Steam Museum, which fires up the coals on high days and holidays.
Lancashire gave birth to the Industrial Revolution because of cheap cotton from America, cheap labour locally and a damp climate that facilitated its spinning beside providing the power to drive the looms. Once water-wheels were supplanted by James Watt's steam engines, there was a plentiful supply of coal beneath those same hills that provided the watershed.
As a result, mill engines like the one seen above were put together in relative haste to meet the burgeoning demand. It is though to date to around 1840 and even then might be viewed as steam-power 2.0 in view of its compound cylinders.
Nice, but neither this nor the machinery it drove was something you'd want to be trapped in, and probably explains the popularity of bonnets.
One of which I might well sport when flying my wearable drone?
