Come on, get your coats off and let's get out in the sunshine instead of stewing in doors like a washed-up blogger with dependency issues! We're off to East Midlands, where my airline career began and where Byron and his mates drank wine until the small hours out of human skull-caps!
As foreigners, the only connection you will have with Nottingham is with its sheriff, who like Mrs Thatcher preferred robbing the poor to give to the rich. But there is a whole lot more to it than that! Well actually there isn't really, but there is the Notts Industrial Museum adjacent a spectacular Elizabethan pile they call Wollaton Hall.
Let me take you by the digital hand and talk you through some of its highlights!
We're confronted at the outset by this cutaway AEC engine that goes slowly round and round, enabling us to see its big ends bathing themselves in sump oil much like the people do in Bournemouth now that the water companies have been privatised. Two things spring out at us from this engine, don't they? The first being its modest horse-power in view of the fact it was hauling double-decker buses and the second that it was produced in diesel and petrol variants... a rarity I am thinking nowadays. It was made in London, which is understandable given the fleet of buses they had.
Moving along please, this car is not THAT old but what distinguishes it from a Tesla for instance is the fact it is still coach-built in wood, with the exception of a pressed-steel chassis and a panel-beaten roof. As timber was plentiful and our woodworkers were not yet being paid to sit at home on Fentanol, it kind of makes sense?
But what's this doing here, a section of London's Victoria Line underground in what am guessing is cast iron? The method probably dates to Brunel and son, tho' now it tends to be reinforced-concrete sections being popped into place behind what they call a boring machine; which is why Elon Musk's hyper-loop project was run by 'The Boring Company'... geddit?
Probably lost in the cliched mists of time, but books used to be retailed like packets of cigarettes at railway stations: an idea pioneered by Allen Lane the day he forgot his iPad. A turning point in British history, meaning travellers could rot their brains at the same time a their lungs.
One of the Rev Awdry's 'troublesome trucks' the likes of this kept turbines turning with coal night and day, and the reason neither locos nor their drivers liked them is that they were not independently braked and instead parked using that handle at the side am thinking. It meant at sidings as they were shunted to-and-fro there'd be a succession of bangs and clangs as either each was accelerated away from the next or else driven against its bumpers. When I was your age, children, I'd fall asleep to the sound of truculent trucks like these or else wheel-spinning shunters at the Edge Lane sidings not too distant. Oh grandad, you poor bastard!
I include this here firstly because I can't be bothered deleting it and second because it encapsulates British engineering history. Before diesel engines, Ruston produced a variety of steam engines designed for driving workshop or agricultural machinery. Nearly a century later it was acquired by English Electric, who turned engines into supersonic interceptors, and later GEC, the UK arm of Edison's company which quite literally powered the American dream.
Moving on (sit next to us for this bit Margaret!), it would be taken over by a French company called Alstom that produced high-speed trains about five decades before the UK could... and counting. The story has a happy diesel ending however, it being sold to German company MAN, which as you'll recall was the first to install Rudolf's engine in a truck.
Now that's what I call a lamp-post, cast here in iron in the form of sea-serpents that fortunately were not often encountered in Nottingham except on street furniture. As I explained to my son, the arms up top were for men to prop ladders against whilst changing the gas-mantles by whose light prostitutes would be murdered.
I include this here as we'll look at Brush later on our travels through Derbyshire, but suffice it to say that following the introduction of the Boulton and Watt engines used principally to pump water from mines or to lower miners into them, firms migrated from static steam to diesel for it quantum leap in energy efficiency. Brush took that further eventually by moving on (literally) to power locomotives.
In the steam hall there's inevitably (and happily) a traction engine, but check out its speed restrictions! This is likely not what the beast was capable of, but what officials considered safest so as not to alarm horses and small children. When automobiles were introduced to the UK, the government threw caution to the winds and allowed them to travel at 4 m.p.h. instead.
I include this as I had one as a child. I took it to a show-and-tell at school, to which Miss Milton commented 'Well, is that it?'. Well fuck you Miss Milton, I've had the last laugh. It's a 'Mamod' model steam-roller, used to make biscuits or something.
We won't forget to check this out though before we leave, as this sort of scale effort was used by employers to provide engineering apprentices with practical hands-on.
And this should have been included upon entry to the steam-hall, which features a live steaming on the fourth Sunday of each month. It's a diesel-powered generator that shows off German prowess in taking over from the Brits where steam left off. Diesel though actually got a better reception hereabouts because of the extent of the mills that were already established, but here it is used to skip mechanical means altogether and wire looms for sound instead of driving them with belts and pulleys. Distributed electrical power is changing flight as we speak in the way it shaped the factories of old. And not just that, but didn't Siemens power the first electric locos?
And could we sensibly leave without admiring this agricultural application of Diesel's engine? Why it needed quite so big an exhaust I don't know, but maybe farmers like to pimp their rides too?
Don't know about you, but I feel we all deserve a digital cream tea after all that!
