Happened upon this beauty left idling away at berth on the Ripon Canal at the weekend, and flabber-gas-ted to discover a Diesel engine and not one running on steam power. This was among the first commercial engines of the type, however, introduced in 1929 by Manchester firm Gardner and delivering 10HP at a leisurely 1000 r.p.m.
It is at this point that the transition from external to internal combustion appeared seamless, the two running and sounding much the same. In fact Gardner began as a manufacturer of sewing machines before a venture into engines that ran on coal gas, for two principal reasons: there were lots of both cotton and coal being made in Manchester at the time.
In fact, making sewing machines (as the founder of Triumph motorcycles did) was a natural fit for making engines too, because they consisted largely of metal castings of the sort that were the bread-and-butter of the Industrial Revolution taking place at the time.
Gardner made diesel engines for luxury cars, buses and trucks beside the one seen here, which was designed as both a stationary and marine engine. They expired in the 1990s when emissions rules ~ which destroyed and continue to destroy many viable industries and may yet be proven to have been an ecological waste of time ~ led to the turbo-diesels that most governments viewed as the solution, at least until they didn't.
The same is happening currently to automotive petrol-engines, making them more expensive, less reliable and harder to maintain altogether: so that they're scrapped before their time. It's wasteful, carbon-intensive and inefficient but the important thing is that it ticks the right boxes; or at least until we all die of heat-stroke.
The engine here ~ like the steam-engine ~ needed no electrical input whatsoever and was started by hand.
As some among my first cars could be.
Among my most popular videos ~ since lost ~ was of an antique diesel two-stroke narrowboat engine ticking over at the Boat Museum in Cheshire. You can listen to this four-stroke here instead however: https://youtube.com/shorts/LdVE01EZooE?
