STEAM GOODS TRANSPORT
Page 3
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This Section deals principally with those essentially-British products, the Steam Wagon and the Steam Tractor
An A11.11ritish Industry.
ID we need any excuse for the allocation of the premier section of the present issue to a discussion and exemplification of the steam wagon and tractor branch of the great subject of haulage on common roads, we should, we consider, be justified in arguing from the basis that steam has played so great a part for many years past in our national existence.
There was a time, of course, when the rail locomotive, to say nothing of its sister machine of the highway, was anathema to any Britisher— when it was even predicted that the passing engines, with their lumbering trains behind them, would frighten the cows and retard agricultural development irretrievably.
The generation which is now approaching middle age has always respected the steam engine, and there is a sentimental regard for it in most engineers' and many laymen's breasts, to the detriment, perhaps, of more modern and, at least, equally important forms of prime mover.
It does not take two eyes t5 see that the steam wagon and its indegendent relative—the five-ton tractor are in the minority when compared with petrol models, on the highways of this country. In many other countries they. are conspicuous, both of them, by their ahnost entire absence. So that w'e should have had no right to yield to them the precedence of mention in Section A on the score of employment only.
They figure there, then, principally on account of their essentially British construction. Perhaps, therefore, they make, something of the kind of appeal to Overseas readers that they do to users in the Home Country. It is a remarkable thing that this class of mechanical haulage, though it has been adopted to a considerable extent in various other parts of the world, has claimed the attention of only one or two constructors in any countries other than Great Britain.
This may not always be so; the steam wagon and tractor industry may some day follow upon the same lines as has the locomotive-building trade. Railway engines are now constructed in France, in Germany, in Italy, and in America, which are the equal, as a rule in all but price, of anything that leaves our British shops. some day there may be steam wagons produced in Constantinople or Calcutta, but that will not he in 1914. This branch was never more active.
It is, of course, undeniable that petrol, in spite of threatenings by cal, coke, and even creosote, holds the field at present. There are but very few examples to date oi paraffin-fired steam boilers for wagons, although in that dire.c6on, as well as in that of superheated steam, we look for much development in the near future.