Raiding the Times

by Cliopatria

Sometimes the New York Times is still worth reading, for an historian. Like today:

The end of an era: Mongolia's coal-fired steam-powered train line is converting to diesel. My father's an old steam train buff and model railroader...
There's many, many little children who'll never thrill to the choo-choo sound,
If they don't put me back upon the railroad and let me keep on chugging around
We are subjects in an ongoing ergonomic experiment, and I want to switch to the control group
E. H. Gombrich's"A Little History of the World" is now available in English, the 18th language that seventy-year old textbook has been translated into. It is both an historical source, as well, according to the reviewer, as a model of textbook writing largely lost in our focus-group, peer-review, market-test, committee-written world.

Sometime's it's not, sure. But then, the same could be said of the AHR.

Speaking of which, I've voted! The e-vote system is pretty decent; no less accessible than the old pamphlet and bubble-sheet, anyway.

Finally, for your blogging pleasure, and in honor of Ralph's labors, a meme: name five historical sources you wish had survived. For me it's

The Oshima emigration documents collected by Doi Yataro, and lost in a house fire a decade before I began my research
More Greek Comedies
An original copy of the Tale of Genji, and a few of the other romances from the period
Anything by Confucius (the Analects is third-generation orally transmitted student notes)
Something that would serve as a Rosetta Stone for Etruscan, Mayan or Incan texts.

I could come up with five more, and fifty more in the course of a semester's lectures. But these would make me very happy.

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Charles V. Mutschler - 10/8/2005

Now that's my kind of history field trip. Too bad you weren't running some of my classes!

CVM

Ralph E. Luker - 10/7/2005

I think I need to write a nice, big grant application to take the Cliopatricians on a train ride! Need good rationale and a deep pockets sugar daddy.

Jonathan Dresner - 10/7/2005

Apparently so. I love the look of this one: so colorful! Thanks!

Manan Ahmed - 10/7/2005

The Oldest working steam locomotive in the world.

Charles V. Mutschler - 10/6/2005

Thanks, Jonathan,

Colorado is indeed one of the places where the tourist railroad business took off after WW II. It's also where I spent part of my childhood, so I'm fairly familiar with the tourist railroads in the state. (Disclosure: I'm a member of the Colorado Railroad Historical Founcation, the group that opeates the Colorado Railroad Museum).

The NYT may be mistaken, but I would guess they are not off by too much. The use of steam to regularly pull freight trains in daily service is diminishing fast. If there are railroads in South Asia still regularly using steam power, it might be worth a vacation trip.

In the wake of the 1973 oil price crunch there was a period of interest in revisiting coal fired steam locomotives in the USA. In 1980 American Coal Enterprises (ACE) was formed to do this. Tests with a state of the art (in 1940) steam locomoive were made, and preliminary design work done on a steam locomotive that would fit modern disel operating expectations. The project died by 1986 without ever having produced a demonstrator locomotive to test on the US railroad system.

The timing was probably wrong - unless oil prices went up and stayed high, the cost of developing a new state of the art steam locmotive wasn't competitive with existing diesel technology. By 1980 the steam locomotive was on the way out everywhere - India had recently ceased building them, and was phasing out existing steam power on an approximately 20 year plan; South Africa still had plenty of steam power and coal to fire it, but was looking at increased use of electrifying railroads to eliminate steam, and then there was China, still building new steam locomotives very much like the last ones built in the USA in the 1940's and early 1950's. Probably it was too late - although the South African Railways had a small design team trying to improve the efficiency of the steam locomotive, electrics were cleaner, more efficient, and probably had government support regardless. China built its last new steam locomotive for main line service in the late 1989's, and, like India, began phasing steam out over a fifteen to twenty year period.

David Wardale, one of the design engineers working on the South African Railways project has written about the efforts to build a modern steam locomotive in the last third of the 20th Century. He is an engineer, writing for fellow engineers, but if history of technology is of interest, you might look for his book: _The Red Devil and Other Tales form the Age of Steam._

Much as I hate to admit it, the steam age is probably over, because electric traction is cleaner and more efficient. Still, like your father, I'll take the dirty, noisy, and utterly enchanting steam locomotive over the quiet, clean efficiency of electrics any day.

CVM

Jonathan Dresner - 10/5/2005

There's quite a few steam trains out there, even in the US (Coronado/something, in Colorado, I think? and a few others). I rode a regular steam run (touristy, yes, but daily nonetheless) from Yamaguchi to Hagi in Japan.

I'm not sure if they're trying to draw a distinction that this is a regular, main-line, long-distance freight run.... but they might not be right about that, either.

Of course, with the price of diesel rising in relation to coal.... don't scrap those engines, yet.

Manan Ahmed - 10/5/2005

I can attest that there are plenty of steam trains choo-chooing along in South Asia.

Charles V. Mutschler - 10/5/2005

Thanks for the link to the NYT article, Jonathan. I remember the end of steam on Class 1 (Major system) railroads in the USA back in the late 1960's.* That's when I started my career in Public history, in junior high school.

I think the NYT may be slightly ahead of events though - possibly the Mugabe government still has some steam working in Zimbabwe, for the same reasons the former Rhodesian Railways were slow to dieselize. Plentiful coal, cheap labor, no on-line petroleum supplies, and a pinched economy.

* The pop quiz for readers: Which railroad, where, when was the end of regular steam freight service on a Class I carrier in the USA?

Charles V. Mutschler

Richard Johnston - 10/4/2005

My layman's understanding was that the Mayan writing system was a combination of a pictography and a syllabary, the latter of which has been pretty much deciphered. However, the former was used mainly for proper names and the like - so I believe we can translate most inscriptions to the level of "God E told [King] "Jaguar Shield" to [some ornate carving] the city of [X]", but have lost for good whatever phonetic values was associated with the pictograms. About 70-80% can be deciphered, IIRC.