The Salamanca

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

<tr><td colspan="2" style="text-align: center; font-size: smaller;">Image:Salamanca von John Blenkinsop.jpg
The Salamanca <tr><th>Builder</th><td>Matthew Murray</td></tr><tr><th>Build date</th><td>1812</td></tr><tr><th>Gauge</th><td>4 ft 1 in</td></tr><tr><th>Total weight</th><td>5 tons</td></tr><tr><th style="color: black; background: #cc9966; text-align: center;">Career</th><td style="color: black; background: #cc9966; text-align: center;">Middleton Railway</td></tr>

**The Salamanca**
Power type	Steam

'The Salamanca' was the first commercially successful steam locomotive built in 1812 by Matthew Murray for the Middleton Railway in Leeds.<ref>Hamilton Ellis (1968). The Pictorial Encyclopedia of Railways. The Hamlyn Publishing Group, pp.20.</ref>

The Salamanca was a rack and pinion locomotive using John Blenkinsop's design for rack propulsion. A single rack ran outside the narrow gauge tracks and was engaged by a cog wheel on the left side of the locomotive. The cog wheel was driven by two cylinders embedded into the top of the center-flue boiler.

Four such locomotives were built for the railway, and they worked until the early 1830s.

[edit] References

Pre-1830 steam locomotives v • d • e</div>
Pen-y-darren (1804) • Catch Me Who Can (1808) • Puffing Billy (1812) • Wylam Dilly (1812) • The Salamanca (1812) • Blücher (1814) • Locomotion No. 1 (1825) • Novelty, Sans Pareil, Rocket, Perseverance (all 1829)
See also: Rainhill trials • History of rail transport in Great Britain to 1830