http://www.ironagemag.com/
Ever see any of those things in operation? They are so cool! Especially the steam tractors, just like locomotives but without the rails.
One a year here in the Richmond VA area Goochland County holds its "Field Day Of The Past" where a lot of these examples of antique machinery are on display and working, really a sight to see.
When I was growing up there were two in the county that would participate in the various local small town parades. They had replaced the steel wheels with truck tires. We followed one home from one of the parades at 60 MPH. No kidding. It was a sparsely populated county, by the way. They would also race them around the dirt track at the County Fair every year.
Just about every old car show that I've been to in the U.K. has at least one or two steam powered road vehicles. Some with vertical boilers, called Sentinels and horizontal-boilered ones called Fodens. I think there were other makes. Once I saw one that had a horizontal boiler that was used for towing artillery. It had side rods and valve gear like a locomotive, it just didn't have steel wheels. A "cab- forward" design. I wish I took some pictures of it.
Unsurprisingly, Douglas Self has a page with some of the 'unconventional' versions of these tractors and 'road locomotives':
http://www.douglas-self.com/MUSEUM/TRANSPORT/traction/traction.htm
For sheer mechanical joy, it's hard to beat the mechanism on some of the Holt steam tractors:
This company would later become known by the tractor tradename: Caterpillar.
Here's a post-WW1 approach by the purveyor of the Showman's Engine made famous by Lesney:
And then there is the Front-Drive Motor Company two-wheel tractor for older steam fire pumpers, of which at least three examples survive:
I tried to find something on the post WWII large tractor project Besler was developing, but did not. Instead, here is a link to a PDF of the 1970 report on steam-powered buses which contains some interesting material.
kgbw49 When I was growing up there were two in the county that would participate in the various local small town parades. They had replaced the steel wheels with truck tires. We followed one home from one of the parades at 60 MPH. No kidding. It was a sparsely populated county, by the way. They would also race them around the dirt track at the County Fair every year.
I think your memory is a bit fuzzy. These things have no suspension at all and those "truck tires" would have to be 6 feet or so in diameter just to make the 5 or so MPH that they were capable of. There are groups that restore and operate them at shows and it's well worth seeing. What they could ddo was amazing. But 60MPH was not one of them.
There's a steam-powered bus in operation at one of the British sea-side resorts. Brighton maybe? I remember seeing a You Tube video showing the same. Pretty neat machine!
Neater than you think - here is a page that has a bunch of buses and trucks of different vintage.
if it's Elizabeth you're thinking of, she was adapted from a Sentinel DG6P ten-wheel truck, a great piece of engineering in its own right. With the warning that sometimes there is excessive Thomas-associated cuteness here, here's Liz in decidedly more cheerful form than her character exhibits on TV.
When not 'in character', she looks like this:
Not sure she will be quite as grand in Crosville green.
Crosville green? Looked it up, if they're going green why not British racing green?
Wishful thinking, I know. Elizabeth'll never set any speed records.
She is cool, though!
The development of the Holt and Best crawler tractors included undercarriages that were analogous to railroads. A common term for them was “tracklayers.” They laid down what amounted to a railroad, and then picked it up behind the tractor as it moved forward. Even today the chain of running surface structures of the track chain links is called “rails.” The track grouser plates are analogous to railroad ties as they spread the loading out to a larger area where it makes ground contact. Crawler tractors carry the majority of their weight on flanged wheels called rollers.
Where the crawler tractor most clearly intersected with railroading was a strange contraption called the Lombard Log Hauler; basically a steam locomotive running on the ground by a “tracklayer” crawler powered undercarriage.
Today’s crawlers steer by differentiating the speed of the two tracks. But that solution was not so obvious in the beginning when it was believed that the tractor had to be steered with steerable front wheels or skis in the case of snow operation. The Lombards towed trains of wooden sleds on roads with formed and frozen ruts to match the gage of the sled runners. A steersman rode in the little front cab and manned a large steering wheel or tiller.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hoVWBouchHA
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WdUC2-X7CRI
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