Gather round now folks, I got something to show you.

William Brunton gives us the first true railway disaster, however the connection is slim. Yes the machine did travel on rails, and yes it ran on steam which actuated cylinders, it did not however propel itself by turning anything around. It actually didn't do a lot of propelling period, but for the time, 1813-15, it was quite the achievement. Just a rather unique way of transferring tons of deadly steam pressure to forward motion.

Affectionately called the Steam Horse or Brunton's Mechanical Traveller (sounds like a 70's English folk group), the train had a pair of mechanical feet that gripped the rails and pushed it forward at a slightly less that walking speed of 3 miles per hour. Now I'm seeing lots of safety concerns pretty quick, but if you have read any of my posts in the past this is exactly the kind of human endeavor that this blog champions. Examining the few patent drawings available its amazing to see no hand rails, no place for an operator to at least stand, let alone sit, no brakes and certainly no shielding around the boiler.

Now as kooky as this rig may appear, it was built to satisfy a need. Stay with me, it gets tricky. Coal had been mined for quite some time and tram ways had been constructed through the coal districts. The coal cars were typically pulled by horses, but years of wars on the continent has used up much of the food for the horses. It was considered an engineering impossibility for a machine to climb most hills because of traction issues, a minor concern for horse drawn trams. Steam had been used for some to power cables and gear mechanisms to get trams up the steep slopes but these were finicky and not at all portable.

Enter Brunton's Mechanical Traveller. And you see why now those strange looking walking feet made so much sense. It was a mountain killer.

The original Steam Horse seems to have ran for a few years without incident and apparently earning its keep so Brunton, commissioned a second, larger machine. It was this machine , during a demonstration on July 31 st 1815, that suffered a total boiler explosion killing 13 spectators and effectively ending any more experimentation with be-footed trains.