Posted by Laurence Monkhouse on June 13, 2006 at 17:31:35 from 80.3.128.6 user Laurence_.
In Reply to: Re: IKB (was Posting long articles and pictures) posted by PeterH on June 13, 2006 at 16:58:52:
I stand open to correction but I should very much doubt if any boiler in 1830 would have been made of plates of cast iron which by then they knew to be dangerously brittle in tension. They surely would have used wrought iron.
My understanding is that Hackworth later complained of a faulty cylinder casting, which certainly would have been made of cast iron and could very easily have been faulty without any foul play at the foundry.
But there is (as far as I am aware) no record of Hackworth bringing such a failure to the attention of the judges, which is obviously what he would have done. I support Peter's assertion that it was a faulty feed pump, which even today can happen to any of us who play with steam. For this reason I have three independent ways of getting water into my own boiler, but that wasn't the practice in those days.
Peter is also correct in saying that nobody used Hackworth's double ended arrangement ever again for passenger engines, but it survived successfully for a long time on 0-6-0 goods engines on Hackworth's home ground of the Stockton & Darlington Railway.
It was, incidentally, Robert Stephenson, not George, who built Rocket.