Page 97 - Vía Libre Special - 25 Years of Spanish High Speed Rail

brake van

history historical full steam books art my camera
ahead
album
history

Rail is speed

When George Stephenson’s “Rocket” reached times and passenger comfort, as Ramón Mesoneros
Romanos reflected in his Nuevo Manual de Madrid:
the speed of 56 km/h at the Rainhill Trials, ”And yet the comfort is so extreme that you can ba-
back on September 27, 1829, the British rely notice any movement, and only when you go
to the open-top part is the wind in your face a little
engineer not only turned the railway into uncomfortable, and speed with which nearby objects
the mode of transport for the 19th century, disappear, so it’s advisable to look into the distance
or, better still, not to look at anything.”
but also made the railway synonymous with

speed. Technology
T that, in this first stage, speeds increased in propor-
From a technological viewpoint the fact is

tion to the diameter of the driving wheels.
As Ángel Maestro, one of the great historians
Turner would be one of the first artists to endor-
of steam locomotives, tells us, in 1837 the “Paten-
se this when in 1844, in his oil painting Rain, Steam
and Speed - The Great Western Railway, he depicted
speed as a phenomenon capable of making even the tee”, a 2-2-2 locomotive with a driving wheel mea-
suring 1,980 mm in diameter, was capable of hauling
very form of the train disappear when, judging by forty tons at 95 km/h on an average gradient of 5
the four-legged speedometer - the hare - running in per thousand”.Pearson, chief engineer of the Great
front of it, the train could have been travelling at no Western, pushed the record up to 132 km/h in 1853, a
more than 70 km/h. world record that stood until 1880, with a 2-2-2-2 lo-
Never before had an object built by a human comotive with a driving wheel 2,740 mm in diameter,
moved so fast. And never before would a record be the largest ever built.
beaten so quickly because the railway companies As the other components of steam locomoti-
made the conquest of ever higher speeds a symbol ves began to be developed, speed began to depend
of their technological progress. on a more varied set of factors.
However, this race had as an indispensable But the race for speed continued, in a com-
prerequisite the improvement of commercial journey petition marked by major successes which society

A Series 103 train holds the Spanish
speed record at 403.7 km/h.

GONZALO RUBIO

Vía Libre • Special 25th Anniversary of the AVE Edition 97