Steam Spring
Steam springs or steam suspension are a form of suspension used for some early steam locomotives designed and built by George Stephenson. They were only briefly used and may have been used for fewer than ten locomotives. Requirements for suspension Early railways used cast-iron fishbelly rails. These were brittle and prone to cracking under shock loads. The new steam locomotives of the 1820s were much heavier than the horse-drawn wagons of earlier plateways. Locomotives of this period also used vertical cylinders set within the boiler. The vertical forces of the moving pistons further gave rise to hammer blow, which increased the load on the rails. A further reason for suspension was to improve the frictional contact between the wheels and rail. This relied upon maintaining a good contact, thus requiring good suspension of the wheels over the uneven track. The ability of an 'adhesion-hauled' locomotive to draw a train was much questioned at this time, as it was thought that t ...
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G Stephensons Patent Locomotive Engine LOC3c10386v (cropped)
G, or g, is the seventh letter in the Latin alphabet, used in the modern English alphabet, the alphabets of other western European languages and others worldwide. Its name in English is ''gee'' (pronounced ), plural ''gees''. History The letter 'G' was introduced in the Old Latin period as a variant of ' C' to distinguish voiced from voiceless . The recorded originator of 'G' is freedman Spurius Carvilius Ruga, who added letter G to the teaching of the Roman alphabet during the 3rd century BC: he was the first Roman to open a fee-paying school, around 230 BCE. At this time, ' K' had fallen out of favor, and 'C', which had formerly represented both and before open vowels, had come to express in all environments. Ruga's positioning of 'G' shows that alphabetic order related to the letters' values as Greek numerals was a concern even in the 3rd century BC. According to some records, the original seventh letter, 'Z', had been purged from the Latin alphabet somewhat ea ...
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