Very interesting retelling of a mostly forgotten part of Railway History. I myself hadn't heard of the Atmospheric Railway, before the dear Jen had briefly talked about it in one episode when she was in Devon a few month ago. Very good video Paul. 👍 And nice seeing Sam. ❤
Back in the 80's whilst staying near Exeter on a holiday from Portsmouth, my Dad being a History hunter, took Us to I think, the only remaining Pumping station for the Atmospheric railway on the West coastal route at Starcross near Dawlish....Its now a Yacht-club as alongside the Exe Estuary (that little pic you showed ) but was then, the home and small museum of a chap who explained the experiment on Brunels GWR and demonstrated on a little sit-on-model....was absolutely Facinating! It was a GREAT idea, but the Technology was Ahead of the Matrials available I think At the time. I now live near Exeter and pass the old pumping station and the track regularly.....LOVE your History vids Paul, Allways Superb!😢
I too visited the Starcross pumping station in the early 1970s. It was a coal depot (I think) at the time, but in any case you could go in and wander around as you liked. The large, square chimney has a staircase inside, and I was able to climb up and look out over the Exe estuary. I don't know whether that is still possible today, but you get a grand view from the top.
I remember that museum very well. It seems such a shame that it wasn't possible to maintain it because the significance of this is so great. The ride activated by the vacuum cleaner showed abundantly that the technology was fundamentally workable, and may well have been successful if the material science had been up to it. If only they had been able to make the flap of, for example, gutta percha (an early reinforced rubber) then it may have been successful. The other thing that sticks in my mind was the clever construction of the chimney which was a square outer tube surrounding a square inner tube, connected by the risers and treads of a slate staircase cemented into both to give a very effective composite structure that was immensely strong without needing great wall thickness. Sadly the chimney was then (as now) only about a third of its original height.
Hi Paul, Very interesting story, I knew about Brunel but not the other systems. Great to see Sam at the end. I do enjoy this doing a walk whilst narrating a story, I think it works very well and you got a good photo of the inside of the tunnel. All the best!!
@@vinny142 The history hasn't been hidden. It's there for all to see. Brunel was far from being first with an atmospheric railway. Clegg and Samuda being of note.
The idea is very simple to come up if you have access to tubes and balls. Want to present ideas as if you were a visionary? Get some 30s 40s 50s 60s pop sci magazines like elon did lol
Very interesting research Paul, thank you. These transportation projects would have been a huge leap forward - they would have provided a fast, safe (no points or traffic from opposite direction on same line) and a very quiet ride. A trial run on the atmospheric railway between New Cross to Croydon on 22 August 1845 when the train reached 60mph and on a later trial achieved an unheard of (then) 70mph. No wonder there were others trying to get these systems to work. Faulty seals, difficult turning carriages around and an inclined section, high cost of creating the vacuum at three pumping station led to the early demise of the Croydon line just four months after opening. New materials, 175 years on, can provide a reliable seal and railways using this technology are now successfully operational. Examples run in Brasil and Indonesia under the name Aeromovel, I believe there may be others possibly in Germany (as a suspended railway) and maybe a new one in Japan. If any readers of this posting can add further info this could be very helpful!
Nice video but I think you left out quite a few other problems. I read a bit about the London and Croydon Railway. In no particular order: Problem 1. Turning a train around at the terminus was awkward and slow. You needed to have a steam-powered shunting engine on hand every time you did this so it was inefficient. Problem 2. Junctions were impractical. Problem 3. Reversing the pipes would have been slow and inefficient making single line working impractical. Problem 4. You could only have one (or two with difficulty) trains in one section of pipe. A section was the pipe between two active pumping stations. If you want to have a more frequent service at peak times this was not possible without more pumping stations. Problem 5. If two consecutive pumping stations failed then everything stopped. The pumping stations were not powerful enough to create a vacuum in three sections. Some of these might have been overcome in time but in the end it did not seem worth it to the companies involved.
Dude, look up the pneumatic railway system! New York once had such a thing - that station featured in Ghostbusters II was fairly faithful in reproduction.
8:53 The wrong Dalkey 😪. The Atmospheric station was about half a mile to the north of the present day Dalkey station. Little remains except the final road overbridge and the cutting where the terminus was.
Thank you for the walking trek this day. Always delve into the past with them. Always easy to interpret for the watchers. Appreciate your work on these fine trips! Hello to Rebecca and hopefully a grand Easter holiday. Enjoy the week ahead, and see you on the next! Cheers mates! ❤️❤️👍👍🙂🙂🇺🇸🇺🇸
the fact these ideas go back to 1799 is fascinating, i just open Medhurst's wikipedia page, i'll be cracking into that later. thanks for another good one Paul!
Paul, it is only recently I've found your channel and have viewed many of your presentations. I'm highly impressed with your video techniques, your research and your professional presentation. As I live in the southwest, I appreciate your in-depth knowledge of the historical infrastructure of this area. Must buy you a pint sometime.
Thanks Paul, very interesting. Like many I suspect, I had only associated Brunel with the atmospheric railway. Great backdrop as well, Chedworth is a fascinating and beautiful area.
Thanks Paul ... as I die hard Brunel fan, I am really pleased to learn about the other engineers who gave him the idea - both George Medhurst and of course the Samudas. With the new materials available today an Atmospheric railway could have been much more successful except electric trains have overtaken the whole idea and for good reason. Your story telling is excellent - keep up the good work! 👍 🤣
Cracking episode Paul. You should be on Terrestrial TV. With your energy and enthusiasm for history and the great British outdoors, I think it would go down a storm.
Massive restrictions on content and budget on tv a lot of the presenters on these shows on tv are just talking heads. RU-vid allows you complete free reign and unlimited earning potential. Everyone who’s come off TV to web media would never go back.
Thanks Paul for a really great, concise review of all the background that led up to the story, one of the best I've heard. Brunel gets a lot of stick from his biographers about the money wasted on "the atmospheric caper" as it became known. It was A LOT of money! £32,000 doesn't sound like much, but it's equivalent to around SIX BILLION in today's money! To put it in perspective, as a money pit, it was about a tenth of what HS2 is today. But given the limitations of locomotive technology at the time it must have been very tempting to think of this as the future, especially given that there were a number of systems working albeit smaller. Brunel was always one to "think outside the box" and try new things, and lots of them didn't work but some did and those that worked, helped make his reputation (boosted always by his monumental ego, his boundless sense of self importance and his eagerness to take huge credit and bask in public acclaim wherever possible!). So I think we can forgive him in technical terms for being tempted to try this, and in the end he was brave enough to call a halt himself, recognising his own misjudgement and that is a VERY hard thing for any engineer to do, let alone the engineer with the biggest ego in history. He had the wisdom to see when something difficult was worth pursuing to get it done (like the Thames Tunnel that took him 30 years to complete) and things that were going nowhere, like this. On the other side, many investors were bankrupted by the venture, but Brunel always cared nothing for other people, and as he hadn't put his own money in, he wasn't bothered. I don't think Brunel was a very nice man to know, or to work for. But I remember a few years ago the BBC held a nationwide public vote to find "the greatest Briton of all time", they held heats and a vote-off and Brunel came second after Churchill. So he made his mark, and we still use so many of his structures to this day. In the end it was material technology that defeated the atmospheric. Not just the lack of a suitable material to make the flap work properly, but the growing availability of steel plate that made steam boilers stronger so they could work at higher pressures, delivering more power and using less coal and water so locomotive traction became more practical. I often wonder what would have happened if Brunel had overlapped with Magnus Volk, the inventor of the electric railway (his early electric railway still exists on Brighton seafront). I suspect the GWR would have been electrified from its inception! My understanding of the rat problem was not so much the rats eating the leather flap, but the rats licking at the whale oil being sucked into the tube under the vacuum and ending up in the pumps and gumming up the works with rat puree. But I don't know where I got that story from, I think it might have been in the atmospheric railway museum (sadly long gone) that was once in the only remaining pumping station, at Starcross. Marion
Interesting, I had not heard of the previous design work thank you. Love the old station. Lovely to see Sam, I just watched Darren and Hedley - are you guys all forming a collective?
Enjoyed this didn't know about the line in Ireland.Great to see you back up in the shire like you said Paul Foss Cross station is in the middle of nowhere worth the walk.
@@TheEmbeddedHobbyist EV’s have their place, they always have, you can’t blame Elon Musk for that, be bought into the company that already existed. EV’s just need to find their niche market which is possibly the school runs, short, but regular trips.
A friend of mine was asked to make a working model for the Newton Abbot museum which he did. Plastic pipe with a slot. AND YES THE FLAP Parcel tape... Same old problem, it worked superbly you just had to re apply the tape after each train passed along.
Just a thought - what about a piston in an UNslotted pipe, the piston containing a magnet. A matching magnet to be mounted underneath the vehicle to attract the in-pipe magnet so the two would be magnetically coupled. Lubrication of the piston would need to be devised and some means of controlling the pressure behind the piston - radio control from the vehicle perhaps? Or then again MAGLEV which has been proven and around for years? Brunel would have loved Maglev.
@@philiptownsend4026 An unslotted *iron* pipe? I don't think plastics were a thing in those days. Or aluminium. (Not sure but I think induced eddy currents in the aluminium would have impeded things). As for Maglev, the electric power requirements are huge, it would be easier just to put an electric motor on the train which, of course, is what they did.
Putting the pressure source behind the train would have been more effective than using atmospheric pressure (approx 15lb/sq in) as a greater pressure difference could have been, even then, generated.
The problem with that is you need the air pressure to push the seal flap closed (at least with period materials). With suction, you can put the seal outside the pipe; pressurization would mean the flap has to be inside. Putting the flap inside would make it harder to install and maintain, and seriously complicate the piston. Putting the flap on top on the outside is also going to make starting up the system easier, since gravity will pull it closed when pressure is equal. Even the modern pressurized implementations are only running a 1-2 psi differential across the piston, using very large ducts.
What an astonishing episode ! Pneumatic tube driven steam pumping station trains. Canals. Weirdly successful technology. Tunnels, Platforms. And then, as if by magic, 🎩, the men with tall stovepipe hats, IK Brunel himself, and his engineering gang. Excellent.
I remember our local shop had a pneumatic tube system for communication between the front and the back of the building. It was really old and a novelty even then and I thought it was the best thing I’d ever seen. Watching a small cylinder go flying up and away was always exciting. Just a miniature version 😂
Growing up in the New York City area I knew of the early pneumatic tube line in the development of the subway system. They must have built upon all this earlier work done across the pond. Good and informative video and has added to my knowledge. Thank you. 😊
Another great video Paul. I've just left a comment about how to pronounce the 'είκοσι' hedron on your video about the 133 dodekahydrons found in the mainly northern part of the old Roman empire and then up popped this video. What a coincidence we live near Topsham, Devon. On the other bank of the Exe river to where Brunel built his 'Atmospheric' railway. There is a great museum in Newton Abbot with an area devoted to his invention and it even has a working model to demonstrate the principle behind how it worked. More power to your and Rebecca's elbows, you make great videos on all the subjects you tackle.
Thanks for the wonderful video. It highlights when multiple new and disruptive technologies come along, people bet on the future, but typically the most practical wins out. The people investing in steam steam engines won out in the end.
You might like to look into another Brunel disaster in Bristol harbour, the SS Great Britain. I understand it wasn't entirely straightforward getting it to the sea from the floating-dock... there's a story to be told. Bonus, time it right and you'll also see a working steam railway and maybe even a steam crane over a century old that's still rated for it's original load 🙂
Fascinating piece of railway history. Not possible to place a preservation order on the Atmospheric railway now, but I wonder if it's possible to 'list' the historic Fosse Cross station building.
Brilliant video. Many thanks. The way we tend to lower our voices when in places of age and adoration and reverence is a wonderful human trait. Thank you.
One of the pumping stations for the London -Croydon still exists in Croydon, dismantled and re erected as a waterworks pumping engine, waterworks yard off of Surrey street Croydon
The atmospheric Inn, at Star Cross has a section of the pipe on the wall. A steam pump house is beside the railway there as well, now used as apartments. Lengths of the atmospheric main were used as a sewage outfall from Dawlish out into the sea. Now long replaced.
Do love these videos. As someone who loves physics, it is always interesting to see how those before us attempted to advance our culture in new and interesting ways. Even now we've only really managed to fire a ping pong ball at supersonic speed at small scale due to some enquiring minds and a sense of fun. Ramping up to full scale would require some huge leaps in materials and technology, but who knows, one day it might be achieved. Great video as always. All the best and keep them coming.
Chedworth tunnel was one of the first that I walked, back in the 1970s. It's crazy to think that all the technology was only about three longish lifetimes ago.
Here is an idea for another video. The train ferry that crossed the Tamar between 1844 and 1859. Should be interesting. As you say, there is a lot more to the Atmospheric story than covered by your video.
Very ingenious system. However, it seems to me that it would have been a LOT easier and cheaper to devise a cable system, above ground, with the cable being run through pulleys - something like today's cable cars.
Cable haulage was used, over limited distances. For example from Edge Hill down to the docks at Liverpool, and from Euston up to Camden Town. Both of these featured gradients into the terminus that were uncomfortably steep for the locomotives of the day. However the cable-hauled sections were only a mile or so long, at the top of which the cables were disconnected and normal locomotives attached. The cables were discontinued when locomotives became powerful enough to handle the gradients. Cable haulage is a practical solution for short steep gradients (and still used today on some cliff railways or 'cable cars'. A lot cheaper and more practical than 'atmospheric'. However its limitations for longer distance trains should be obvious.
we did not move the engine from the train. They all have electric motors except tramways. But we did remove the fuel and it is supplied by wires along the track.
Wasted is an emotive word. If you take a look at old railway maps there were often duplicate lines and stations created by railway companies. These were closed over time to save cost. When created railway lines and stations were there to carry goods and passengers. To make money for shareholders. Yes there are many fine buildings which were closed. But you can’t keep everything open. It costs.
Paul a vacuum is a pressure lower than atmospheric pressure. A full vacuum is 30in of Hg below atmospheric pressure. Vacuum brakes on all railways other than the GWR operated on a vacuum of 21in of Hg (IIRC the GWR used a vacuum of 24in of Hg).
That entire text needs to be on a bronze plaque dedicated to the beauty of Engineering and also something snide about how it's not science 😉😂❤️.... that's so not the definition of a vacuum but also a great example of how engineers (aka applied physics) get stuff done while theoretical physicists spend decades debating untestable string theory hypotheses 🤦♂️🙌
@@nonsequitor Without blue sky research there would be no applied science. Pretty much every modern technology was at some point chalk scrawls on a theoretician's blackboard. Without Maxwell's equations there would be no TV and no wifi. Without Boolean algebra there would be no computers. Without Einstein's equations there would be no GPS. And so on. The thing about applied science is that as useful as it is at finding practical solutions to engineering problems, it can also be ruthlessly wasteful in time and resources for its "also ran" projects. For instance, pharmaceutical companies have been known to throw many billions of dollars at systematically hunting for useful molecule and protein combinations without success. Or the 7 decades long attempts to create a fusion reactor that can achieve more than breaking even. Or indeed the atmospheric railway as it is arguably another example. Meanwhile theoretical physicists are very cheap to run. Most of them have no need of space probes or particle accelerators. Just give them a book-strewn office, a cup of tea, a chocolate digestive and a blackboard to play with and leave them to it. Sooner or later they will hit upon something world changing that no corporate institute could ever have foreseen. Incidentally I'm far from convinced by String Theory myself, but I don't see my opinion as a reason not to research. Ironically if ST is correct about quantum field theory, then our whole reality is only metastable and it's possible to create a vacuum state so perfect that it would cause the entire cosmos to be destroyed. Better not press _that_ kind of vacuum brake too hard!
Because a vacuum has a limit unlike compression it would have been impossible to improve on the system (i.e. improve on speed) even if the seals held up, i used to work on vac pumps for huge autoclaves drive a car through size, we could never get more than 27in.
A really interesting documentary there Paul. Almost like to the history of the railways has been re-written , hold on - it has. Thank you for making and sharing this truly fascinating video. I deleted an old RU-vid channel that wasn't "going anywhere" (pun intended), and started over with a brand new channel, and I have subscribed once again to your channel. 🙂
While the initial idea was not successful to move people and animals, the technology can still be found in hospitals, and large retail stores (Co-op) etc.. to transport small items papers, blood samples, reports, etc.. round a building. There are also commercially available cylinders which work on the original principals but only up to 2 meters stroke (limited by manufacturing and transport details)
The sliding seal on a pressure / vacuum tube was eventually perfected on steam catapults on aircraft carriers - I wonder whether they investigated the atmospheric railway concepts when they were developing it?
It probably helps that as much pressure as is needed can be developed subject to energy and materials but a vacuum is severely limited to maximum of one atmosphere difference from ambient. If the aircraft carriers catapults leak air then they can generate more pressure to tend to compensate. The early static steam engines (as in old tin mines etc) were severely limited as they used vacuum rather than pressure to operate.
13:45 I'm glad someone finally said it. Rats are a myth. People always claim to have seen rats but we all know there are no rats in the real world. Sorry, it just kind of sounded like you were saying the rats themselves were a myth. Not just the rats eating the leather. Thanks for the interesting story.
Interesting how at the beginning they abandoned the idea of the whole tunnel being the pressure vessel, with the passengers inside it. And a century and a half later some guy ressurected that idea, and all of tue attendant issues.
I'm rather surprised it ever worked at all! A big leather tube with a slit in the top... how is that going to maintain a pressure difference over several miles?
As a retired Civil Engineer I should have thought that Brunel's Big Mistake was designing a ship that was wider than the dock gates which she had to pass through on her way to the sea? It was probably one of the greatest of all the early engineers, the inventor of the axle, who stated "measure twice, cut once . . . . . " With regards to the liking of rats for atmospheric railways see Francis Trevelyan Buckland's Curiosities of Natural History (1857): from page 146 "There is another curious instance of rats losing their lives in quest of food, which has been kindly communicated to me by a friend. When the atmospheric pump was in use at the terminus of the Croydon Railway, hundreds of rats lost their lives daily. The unscientific creatures used in the night to get into the large iron tube, by exhausting the air from which the railway carriages were put in motion, their object being to lick off the grease from the leather valve, which the engineers of the line were so anxious to keep air-tight. As soon as the air-pump was put to work for the first morning train, there was no resisting, and out they were sucked dead corpses!" (I note it is "communicated to me by a friend" 🤨)
' The Neighbourhood of Dublin ' 2 nd edition, 1939 by Weston St. John Joyce has a very good chapter on the Atmospheric Railway. It worked for 11 years. In winter they used goose fat to keep the flaps supple of the ' bolus' tube. The rats loved it!
IKB really wasn't as great as people make us believe. No people skills and a few really bad projects. Thomas Telford was by far a better engineer with innovative ideas, enthusiasm and enduring legacy projects. Great VLOG, thanks Paul.
There is an intact pumping station at Starcross on the Exe estuary, which used to house a working model of the atmospheric railway, which you could ride on for a few yards. Using modern, synthetic materials instead of leather, I believe this idea may still be viable.
Had Brunel had the materials we have today there is evidance that the system was viable. A test run from Exeter actually proved quite amazing for the time. The huge problem to make it totally unviable was the inability to switch lines ie points.
This seems to be similar to the San Francisco cable cars (1876). Instead of atmospheric tubes under the train, the cable cars had steel cable located below street level. The cable was moved by a central power station. This cable ran at a steady speed (9.5 mph). The train was able to connect & disconnect with the moving with a lever controlled by the operator.
In the 90s, Adam Hart Davies had a programme called 'local heroes' and he said it was mice eating the tallow was the failing, this might be where this rumour was spread
The other other centralise the powersource system was cable trams that used cable running in the road. Most famous and still running as a tourist trap in San Francisco, but did have some mild success particularly in hilly cities around the world.
I think I recall an episode or two of Murdoch Mysteries that had the Atmospheric Railway as a plot device. The main issue I had with it was using fans to create a vacuum strong enough to kill, haha wait a minute there...
I'd heard of Brunel, but I don't recall this type of railway. I bet I read some vague description that didn't work, so I didn't catch on to what it was. I wish I could have had places like those to explore...here, if you go wandering around on other people's property, you might get arrested or shot. Not to mention the disgusting habit people around here have of tearing old buildings down, not making any effort to protect historic or otherwise valuable places. Just a few blocks from here was an old YMCA, that had started life as just a house. It was a beautiful building, and I would have bought it and lived in it, if I'd had the chance...and they tore it all down just to have a vacant lot to put a baseball diamond on, and they tore down the mansion across the street, that was also a great building. It had been used as an apartment building for many decades, and should have stayed. But people around here are good at sneaking in destruction before anyone who cares finds out.
Got to the end and still waiting to hear what the disaster was! The leather wearing out and they decided not to replace it because it was too expensive? The word "disaster" is unfitting and possibly even click-bait! The Hindenburg, *that* was a disaster. This was merely an unfortunate end in which nobody got hurt (except maybe financially).
Couldn't agree more. Some twatt who never created anything in his life sits in criticism of a genius. News just in the abject failure and disappointment to his parents, Leonardo Da Vinci, never got his helicopter to fly. Incidentally, there were others experimenting with this type of railway. We even had one in Ireland.
Well, as a railway it was pretty disastrous. Because of the false promise of the atmospheric system, Brunel built the South Devon line with some pretty steep banks - Hemerdon, Rattery and Dainton - among the steepest main line gradients in Britain. Any others as steep were intended for cable haulage. Those three banks were a significant operating problem for the Great Western and its successors from that day onwards. Their only virtue has been giving visiting preserved steam engines a good workout.
Only for a while I suspect as the "flap" will always be subject to wear as the link passes along the slot. Regular replacement of gasket would be needed.
Very interesting. Many thank. I am one of the many people who was wrong assumption that the Dalkey railway failed due to rats eating the leather. And BTW at the risk of being pedantic - Dalkey is pronounced similar to “door-key”. Keep up the good work. Mark K Dublin, Ireland.
Imagine an attempt at an atmospheric railway with silicone rubber and lubricants available… probably still wouldn’t have worked but it might have been interesting.
The sticking point is the mechanical link twixt piston in pipe and train above pipe. Somewhere else I these Comments I offer a magnetic link and an UNslotted pipe. Magnetic piston and corresponding magnet under vehicle just above the pipe. Or Maglev of course, Brunel would have liked Maglev.
An absolutely fascinating and informative documentary Oh those wonderful 18th and 19th Century Engineers building on each other and going forward. Visionary and never giving up making mistakes yes but moving on. Only if you do nothing do you NOT make mistakes. Just one slight quibble your touching faith in electricity and electric overhead lines. Even they can fail. Many years ago just as we left York Station an almighty Thunderstorm started. Our Train which had overhead electric lines was struck by an almighty bolt of lightening. We were stuck there for 5 hours! and the whole down line to London East Coast line was blocked for I do not know how long! So am afraid no system is 100% fool proof! However thank you a wonderful slice of railway history. Your enthusiasm is catching.
