Part 19 of Railway Wonders of the World was published on Friday 7th June 1935.
This issue contained a black and white art plate depicting the Lickey Incline. The plate was attached to page 589, or the fifth page of this issue.
The Cover
This week’s cover shows a “head-on” view of the Southern Railway locomotive “Camelot”. The express engine belongs to the celebrated "King Arthur" class. It has a 4-6-0 wheel arrangement. The two cylinders have a diameter of 20½ and a stroke of 28 in. The driving wheels measure 6 ft 7 in. Its total heating surface is 2,215 sq ft. The fire-grate area is 30 sq ft and the working steam pressure is 200 lb per sq in. The tractive effort at eighty-five per cent of the working pressure is 25,450 lb. The engine and tender weigh 138½ tons.
An account of the attempt to drive trains by air pressure. The atmospheric system was patented by Clegg and Samuda in the nineteenth century. This system made use of the pressure of the atmosphere to drive trains. Experiments in this unique method were tried in London, South Devon and Ireland. During trials in 1847 on the South Devon line, it was reported that a speed of seventy miles an hour had been reached with light trains and a speed of thirty-three miles an hour with a train of 100 tons. How the atmospheric railway worked, and how it had eventually to be abandoned, is told in this chapter.
(Pages 586-588)
The Lickey Incline
THE FAMOUS LICKEY INCLINE between Bromsgrove and Blackwell, Worcestershire, on the LMS Bristol to Birmingham line. The gradient is 1 in 37.7 for two miles, and the railway uses a unique four-cylinder
0-10-0 banking engine to aid trains up the incline. This picture shows a goods train, assisted by two locomotives, going up the incline.
The story of the construction and opening of one of the longest underwater tunnels in the world. It is the longest double-line tunnel in Great Britain, and its construction ranks as one of the outstanding railway engineering achievements in England. The building of this famous tunnel - two miles and a quarter of which are under the River Severn - and the ingenuity of the engineers in defeating the various obstacles that threatened to bring the enterprise to a standstill, are fully described. Among interesting facts concerning the Severn Tunnel is that a pumping plant raises, on average, 20,000,000 gallons of water a day so that the tunnel shall be kept clear. This is the second article in the series Marvels of Engineering. There is an illustration of Diver Lambert stemming a flood in the Severn Tunnel in Frederick Talbot’s Railway Wonders of the World (1913). You can read more on the Severn Tunnel in Wonders of World Engineering.
Some notable examples of unorthodox construction. The main principles of Stephenson’s “Rocket” of 1829 are the main principles of the modern express engine. There have, however, been many departures from the more formal practices in locomotive design. These departures, which make a most interesting story and form an important link in the development of locomotives, are dealt with in this chapter. This article deals with many unusual types of locomotives such as the the early "Hurricane" of 1838, which had 10 ft diameter driving wheels; the famous Webb compounds used on the old LNWR; the Mallet articulated locomotives; the Fell locomotives with both vertical and horizontal driving wheels, and some modern experiments in locomotive design such as the Ljungstrom turbine locomotive and the LNER's No. 10000.
A description of Volk’s Electric Railway, the first successful electric railway in Great Britain. In the Editorial of Part 18, Clarence Winchester describes “some very interesting correspondence with Mr Magnus Volk, inventor and founder of the railway. Mr Volk, who is 83 years of age, has sent me some interesting facts and some splendid photographs, not only of the present railway, but also of its equally interesting and unique forerunner. This was an electric train which ran out at sea and which was known as the Brighton and Rottingdean Extension. The passenger coach was supported on legs some twenty-three feet above the sea, and the line was known as the “railway on stilts”. At the time of its opening, the newspapers predicted that rails laid beneath the sea, with their carriages supported on legs. would supersede all other forms of sea travel, including ships!"
Challenging road competition through the development of diesel railcars, whose superiority over the steam driven rail-motor is being steadily demonstrated in this country. This is
