The thumbnail pic is just so great....👌👌👌 Would love to hae seen that in colour, the Fitzpatrick Tripe D would have been in their corporate dark green & the Thames Trader would have been in the then JCB or Doe colours...???
Fascinating videos, as always. I find myself seeing similarities between the Doe tractors a broadly similar chapter of transport history: Articulated steam locomotives, particularly the early Mallet compound engines developed in America, France, and Germany around the end of the 19th Century. The original raison d'etre was the same: How to derive double the power from existing technology. And the answer was basically the same: Combine two machines into one, though in the Mallet's case it was using the same steam twice through multiple sets of cylinders before exhausting rather than having multiple boilers. Even the overall track of production was the same: Mallets enjoyed great popularity through the early 1900's-1910's, but by the 1920's larger conventional steam locomotives came along that were roughly as strong as the early mallets for half the maintenance cost. Some giant mallets carried on, such as the Union Pacific Big Boys and the beasts of the Norfolk & Western, but much like Ford's newest tractors matched the original Doe Triple D's, by the end of steam most mallets had been rendered obsolete outside of highly specialized roles by standard steam engines, to say nothing of the new diesels, which couldn't match steam's power alone but could be lashed together up to 6 deep to operate as one.
